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A LITTLE BOOK 
OF SERMONS 

BY 
LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 









Copyright, 1922, by 
LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 



Printed in the United States of America 



JUL -7 1922 



©CI.A674833 









TO MY FRIENDS OF 

CENTRAL METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

DETROIT, MICHIGAN 

THIS VOLUME 

IS 

AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Word from the Author 9 

I. The Man of the Hour 11 

II. The Renaissance of Religion 26 

III. The Disillusionments of a Hundred Years 40 

IV. The Ampler Puritanism 52 

V. A Nation of Readers 69 

VI. The Press and the Community 80 

VII. The Land With a Friendly Face 94 

VIII. The Treasure 107 

IX. Increasing the Values of the World 119 

X. The Ministry of the Mystic 134 

XI. The Great Companion 149 

XII. The Privilege of Living 160 



A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR 

A number of the sermons printed in this 
book grew out of particular occasions and 
were connected with particular places. 
"The Ampler Puritanism" was preached in 
the Sherwell Congregational Church, Plym- 
outh, England, on Sunday evening, Sep- 
tember 5, 1920, at the Pilgrim Tercenten- 
ary service, attended by the Mayor and 
Corporation of the city. "The Renaissance 
of Religion" and "The Treasure" were 
preached in Carrs Lane Congregational 
Church, Birmingham, England. "The 
Man of the Hour" was preached in The 
City Temple in London. "The Disillusion- 
ments of a Hundred Years" was preached 
in Sage Chapel, Cornell University. "The 
Land with a Friendly Face" was preached 
in Orchestra Hall, Detroit, on Thanksgiv- 
ing Day, 1921, at a Community service or- 
ganized by a Committee of Protestants, 
Roman Catholics, and Jews. The other 
sermons were preached in the pulpit of 
Central Methodist Episcopal Church in 

Detroit. 

9 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the 
wind, and a covert from the tempest, as streams of 
water in a dry place, as the shade of a great rock in 
a weary land. — Isaiah 32. 2. 

There was a time in the American Civil 
War when all was not going well with the 
military activities of the Northern armies. 
It seemed clear that the fighting men were 
handicapped by lack of adequate leader- 
ship. A powerful American writer kept 
calling out so that the whole country heard, 
"Abraham Lincoln, give us a man!" The 
cry is not one which belongs to any par- 
ticular place or to any particular time. 
The call for a leader is a perpetual human 
call. Sometimes the need becomes tragi- 
cally poignant. Sometimes its urgency is 
not very deeply felt. But all the while the 
man of vital leadership is needed, and 
until he comes men wait and watch for 
him, as they wait and watch for the morn- 
ing. They not only wait for him, but they 

11 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

help to produce him. Out of their com- 
mon aspiration, out of their common strug- 
gle, out of their common hope, he arises at 
last to do his work in the world. People 
must dream the right dreams and hope the 
right hopes if the highest sort of leader is 
produced among men. 

Just now we are all watching the night 
sky for some star which shall guide us to 
the leader for whom we wait. We all have 
a feeling that much of the deepest mean- 
ing of contemporary life has not become 
articulate. We believe that there is a syn- 
thesis of the deepest things which are 
stirring in the hearts of men, and that out 
of this synthesis is to come the material 
for the making of the new day. We are 
waiting for the man who can think into 
totality all the confusing, palpitating ele- 
ments of our life, and can be the critic and 
the prophet and the statesman of the new 
world. Perhaps there are to be a number 
of men who do this work. But we have a 
feeling that it must all come to command- 
ing creative enthusiasm in the mind of one 
man before it can go forth in the activities 
of many alert leaders, and of the mass of 

12 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

men and women everywhere. Hobbes' Le- 
viathan, in a certain edition, used to con- 
tain an illustration of a composite man 
built up of many men. The leader in a 
democracy must in a sense have just this 
composite quality. And while we wait for 
him, it will be well for us all to be thinking 
and dreaming and hoping, analyzing the 
quality of the work which he must do, so 
that out of this common stock of medita- 
tion and hope shall be gathered the ma- 
terials for his leadership as well as the 
materials with which he will work. In this 
fashion we will be hastening the day of the 
man in our own time who will be a hiding 
place from the wind, a covert from the 
tempest, as streams of water in a dry place, 
as the shade of a great rock in a weary 
land. 

1. In the first place, it is clear that the 
Man of the Hour when he comes must be 
a man of intellectual penetration. We 
mean more than intellectual discipline. 
The trained dialectician may be no more 
than a man who defends his prejudice with 
consummate brilliancy; we mean more than 
ripe culture, for culture may mean the 

13 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

power to cause ivy to grow over ancient 
ruins while men are waiting for a whole- 
some and sanitary habitation. We mean 
more than a mind of infinite agility, ready 
to think thoughts of all kinds of men 
after them. For this sort of skill may 
mean the capacity to use all the watch- 
words without knowing the profound sig- 
nificance of any of them. We mean the 
quality of mind which adds to its dis- 
ciplined dialectical skill, and to its wide 
ranging versatility and sympathy, a cer- 
tain power of cutting to the heart of things, 
of finding the really defining element in a 
situation, of brushing aside the incidental 
and coming to the essential, and then of 
expressing the actually significant matter 
in phrases of that direct and notable sim- 
plicity which carries compulsion to the 
common mind. 

II. Then the Man of the Hour must be 
a man of moral authority. Lord Robert 
Cecil has recently made some telling re- 
marks having to do with the relation be- 
tween a government and moral authority. 
And it may be said with complete assur- 
ance that the leader who will do for men 

14 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

and with the help of other men the thing 
which most needs to be done must be a 
man whose power of moral command car- 
ries immediate conviction. There is a 
great difference between moral authority 
and moral assertiveness. Many men are 
willing to offer themselves as a sort of 
human conscience for the period, who 
would substitute loudness of voice for ethi- 
cal insight, and vigor of expression for the 
compulsion of character. The ethical life 
of the English-speaking peoples runs very 
deep, and it is not always very articulate. 
But it is a matter which the man who 
aspires to leadership must take with the 
utmost seriousness. If he is unable to 
command a certain ethical confidence, the 
time will come when all will be lost. There 
may be times of misunderstanding. But 
the essential ethical soundness and eleva- 
tion of his leadership must stand out at 
last if it is to be maintained. 

The might of the moral must is a very 
real and commanding power in contem- 
porary life. The cynics may smile at it. 
The pessimists may doubt its seizure of the 
mind of the twentieth century. The evil- 

15 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

minded may smile at its behests as Mid- 
Victorian sentimentality. But the English- 
speaking world has conscience entwined in 
most of the living words of the language, 
and deeply enshrined in its heart. Its 
conversations are often careless as regards 
ethical considerations; but its actions must 
be justified by a moral standard if they are 
in any real sense satisfactory. The leader 
who gains permanent trust must speak with 
authority to this deep moral intuition. 

III. The Man of the Hour must be char- 
acterized by social passion. Of course he 
cannot be the mouthpiece of those forces 
which are to give refuge and hope to hu- 
manity in its collective life unless he feels 
the pang of the lonely heart, the tragedy 
of the cast off life, and all the woe of the 
social disintegration of our time. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem called 
"The Voiceless." In many an age the 
socially disfranchised have been indeed 
without a voice. To-day they are becom- 
ing awake. They are rising. They are 
speaking. And the voices rising from men 
wistful and eager and hopeful and defiant, 
from these masses of men to whom life has 

16 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

offered little and before whom the world 
has closed most of its doors, are among the 
most tragic and beautiful and summoning 
things in the life of our time. They are as 
dangerous as any intense life. They are as 
glorious as hope. Dante was called the 
voice of ten silent centuries. The Man of 
the Hour must be the voice of multitudes 
of inarticulate human beings. He must 
think their thoughts after them. He must 
live himself into the meaning of their lives. 
By their stripes he must be healed of self- 
ishness and prepared for really self -forgetful 
service. Mrs. Browning's "Cry of the 
Children" has expanded into a vast litera- 
ture telling the woeful tale of the condi- 
tions which blight human life and thwart 
human effort. This literature must speak 
its whole message to our leader. But more 
than that. The wound of evil environment 
must have been felt by his own tender 
flesh. He must replace the knowledge of 
the reader by the knowledge of the man 
who has personally felt the weight of tragic 
and evil conditions. It is easy to be inter- 
ested in humanity while one draws back 
from particular people. Our leader must 

17 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

press close to actual men, finding his way 
past all the barriers of prejudice and cus- 
tom and temperament and entering into 
intimate and understanding relations with 
individual men. His idealism must break 
its way past the unlovely characteristics of 
particular human beings. His social pas- 
sion must transfigure particular men. He 
must see them in the light of their capacity. 
He must not judge them by their history. 
So his passion for humanity and his friend- 
ship for particular men will guide and in- 
terpret each other. He will be a social 
prophet with the tang of an individual 
human interest about him. He will have 
captured the fine secret of Jesus, who was 
moved by the multitude and infinitely in- 
terested in the individual man. 

IV. The Man of the Hour must be a 
man of spiritual ambition and a man with 
a profound sense of spiritual values. While 
he lives he will not neglect seeing the things 
which are visible. He will also live as see- 
ing the invisible. The mystic who is 
merely a dreamer is often remote enough 
from the age which needs his shining ideal- 
ism. The man who is alive to the finger 

18 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

tips and conscious of every quivering energy 
of the age in which he lives, if he is also a 
man who lives in conscious relationship to 
the light never seen on sea or land, is a 
man of peculiar power. His practical 
grasp on human problems is reinforced, 
and his inner life is developed in definite 
human dependableness. He becomes a 
practical mystic. And a practical mystic is 
one of the most powerful men in all the 
world. Our leader will be a man who 
presses past all the crude hesitations of this 
transitional period and finds himself face 
to face with the virile spiritual mastery of 
Jesus. That Master will master him, and 
in accepting that mastery he will become 
more nobly and dependably masterful than 
he ever was before. The great realities of 
God and the life of the Spirit will be lumi- 
nous and commanding in his own life, and 
through his interpretation will come to 
have a new grasp upon the life of the 
world. The sense of the eternal will give 
new significance to the temporal. He will 
be in a more effective way a man of this 
world because many of his motives come 
from regions beyond this world's life. He 

19 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

will be a better citizen of his own city 
because he has seen the vision of the New 
Jerusalem coming down from heaven. Re- 
ligion will not be a convenient method of 
securing the allegiance of certain groups of 
people who are guided by motives in which 
he assumes an interest for the purposes of 
practical politics. Religion will be a high 
and commanding and authentic sanction 
which gives the final quality of richness 
and fullness to his own life. And the deep 
and terrible sincerity of his religious life 
will give him a new power of leadership in 
the very world where we live. 

V. The Man of the Hour must be a 
scientific humanist. Of course there is no 
real conflict between science and human- 
ism. Science has to do with the uniformi- 
ties of existence. Humanism has to do 
with the personal world of freely moving 
initiative. The two worlds are two aspects 
of one fundamental reality. The leader 
who only believes in freedom can never be 
just to that reign of law which the nine- 
teenth century made so commanding to 
the thought of men. And he can never be 
just to those orderly relationships without 

20 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

which society can have no permanent sta- 
bility. The man who simply believes in 
the mechanical and mathematical uniformi- 
ties which reveal themselves in the imper- 
sonal world, and would carry them over 
into the personal world as well, comes into 
a state of mind which would banish initia- 
tive and nobly creative energy from the 
world. He loses the thing which Watts 
Dunton used to call the sense of wonder. 
He becomes incapable of rousing men, of 
inspiring their faith, and of releasing new 
energies and new enthusiasms in their lives. 
The real leader must have all the steadi- 
ness which comes from a study of the uni- 
formities of nature, and all the richness 
and creative energy which come from a 
study of the wide-ranging, free-moving ad- 
venture of the personal spirit in the world. 
He must be a scientific humanist. 

VI. Then the Man of the Hour must be 
a man of organizing efficiency. The dif- 
ference between the prophet and the states- 
man lies at this point. The prophet sees a 
vision and expresses it in noble and sum- 
moning words. The statesman realizes it 

in effective action. And the prophetic 

21 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

statesman is the man who sees a great 
vision of the future, summons men to its 
realization in powerful speech, and then 
organizes them for its achievement in such 
a masterful fashion that the lofty dream 
becomes a concrete reality. To all his 
other qualities our leader must add this 
capacity for organizing men effectively. 
Even in great movements of the religious 
life this is evident. The power of Wesley 
in the eighteenth century lay in the fact 
that he was both a prophet and an organ- 
izer. He saw that the gospel he preached 
crystallized into a permanent institution. 
Where there is no vision the people perish. 
Where there is no efficiency vision is never 
able to do its real work in the world. The 
captain of industry with his far-flung king- 
dom of commerce is full of suggestiveness 
as we think of these things. The captain 
in the realm of the world's larger leader- 
ships must learn every secret of organizing 
efficiency which the captain of industry 
knows. And he must use all this organ- 
izing power in the name of those mastering 
ideals which possess his mind and drive his 
conscience and enrich his spirit. 

22 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

The man who combines these varied 
qualities and abilities may seem a man 
about whom we can think, but a man we 
will never see. We need to remember, 
however, that no other age has failed of a 
man in whom its varied aspects of life 
came to a certain rich and harmonious ex- 
pression. And this man will merely be the 
man who captures the varied meaning of 
this age and utilizes all its elements of 
strength in the formation of his own life 
and leadership. It is not too much to be- 
lieve that he will arise and do his work in 
the world. But it is also clear that there 
is only one way in which he can be pro- 
duced. Demosthenes used to say that the 
audience makes the oration. It is clearly 
true that in a democracy the people make 
the leader in a very genuine fashion. As 
all together we think and hope and dream 
and believe in this sort of leadership we 
will be preparing the way for the leader 
when he comes, and we will be making it 
possible for him to come. There is, of 
course, one sense in which the great leader 
comes with all the mystery of a sudden 
and noble gift from God. He gives to 

23 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

men the pattern which he has seen in the 
mount. But there is another sense in 
which he is the product of the deepest 
yearning, the most aspiring hope, the most 
nobly vicarious prayer, of the period to 
which he speaks. There is a sense in 
which fourth-century Athens made Plato 
inevitable. Fourteenth-century Europe 
was itself expressed in Dante. To be 
sure, fifth-century Athens too made way 
for Plato, and thirteenth-century Europe 
made way for Dante. But this the more 
clearly shows that the great man rises 
from the rich soil whose fertility he has 
taken into his own life. Even Jesus came 
in the fullness of time. When we produce 
the fullness of time we will have the leader. 
It is the profoundest work of the democra- 
cies of the world to produce the fullness of 
time. 

We go back, then, to the splendid pro- 
phetic vision of man's ministry to man. 
We go back to the inspiration of the 
thought of the protecting leadership of the 
great man. A man shall be a hiding place 
from the wind. A man shall be a covert 
from the tempest. A man shall be as 

24 



THE MAN OF THE HOUR 

streams of water in a dry place. A man 
shall be as the shade of a great rock in a 
weary land. And by the grace of God we 
must produce that man. 



25 



II 

THE RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee 
up on a high mountain; O thou that tellest good 
tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; 
lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, 
Behold, your God! — Isaiah 40. 9. 

A powerful English writer once pub- 
lished a little poem entitled "The Funeral 
of God." He was not the first to suggest 
that we have almost done with Deity. We 
have not forgotten the clever and witty 
Frenchman who was ready to escort God 
to the edge of the universe, thank him for 
his past services, and politely bow as he 
witnessed the departure of the late Master 
of life. Many people have been ready to 
celebrate the obsequies of religion. We 
remember that Bishop Butler fell upon a 
time when religion had almost ceased to be 
able, as he felt, to command the interest 
/ of intelligent men. But the religion which 
is thrown to the ground has a curious way 
of turning out to be a seed instead of a 

26 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

corpse. Life emerges from it. There are 
sproutings and growings, and soon the tree 
is lifting its branches again, and ere long 
once more men are rejoicing in its abun- 
dant shade. It almost seems that the 
world might have learned that religion pos- 
sesses a secret of perpetual life. Just when 
you think that it is dead it is born again. 
There was something imperial about the 
/ way in which the Christian religion swept 
in triumph over the early Roman Empire. 
It was simply impossible to kill Christians 
as fast as other men accepted the Christian 
faith. And so after three centuries of 
struggle the empire surrendered and be- 
came Christian. But if Christianity con- 
quered the empire, it did not save the 
empire. The barbarians overwhelmed the 
orderly civilization which had given sta- 
bility to the life of the world. Surely, we 
would say, the religion which failed to 
revitalize the empire would go down under 
the ashes of its burning structure. But it 
was not so. Emerging fresh and vital from 
the flames of a burning world, Christianity 
set about taming the barbarians. It put 
its hand upon the fierce and powerful men 

27 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

who had conquered Rome, and it mastered 
them. It bent them to gentler and wiser 
forms of life. It dominated their thinking 
and recreated their ideals. And out of 
them it began forming the Europe which 
was to be. In the meantime the church 
which had been a life became an organiza- 
tion. The vitality was lost in the complex 
wheels of a vast machinery. More of Jew- 
ish and Roman law than Christian gospel 
was found in the imperial church. Surely, 
religion was lost in all this brilliant and 
far-flung ecclesiastical empire? But no. 
Just that thirteenth century which wit- 
nessed the splendors of Innocent III also 
witnessed the winsome piety of Saint Fran- 
cis of Assisi and all that movement by 
which Europe was refreshed in spirit as by 
the coming of spring. The singing Fran- 
ciscans, with their self-forgetful service, 
fanned the soul of Europe into a bright 
flame, the flame of that fire which is burn- 
ing without being consumed. Then came 
an era of disintegration. And when life 
seemed to have departed from the life- 
giver, when the world needed to be saved 
from the church, when it seemed that reli- 

28 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

gion had indeed failed upon its last battle- 
field, and the new learning rather than the 
old religion was offering open doors of life 
to men, once again the golden moment 
came, and the sixteenth century saw the 
kindling of all those fires of the spirit 
which made religion the master of the 
inner life of man and the captain of his 
activities. The Reformation was a rebirth i 
of religion just when such a rebirth might 
have seemed least probable. But the Ref- 
ormation itself at last crystallized into 
forms which had lost their vitality. There 
came the day of the Protestant scholasti- 
cism with all its arid and lifeless activities 
of the mind. But just when the freezing 
cold of it seemed to have swept away the 
warm and rich currents of life Pietism came 
sweeping into Germany, and the seven- 
teenth century had its rebirth of the Spirit. 
By the eighteenth century the cold and ur- 
bane hardness of deism had entered deeply 
into the fabric of England's life. Then it 
was that Bishop Butler found and be- 
wailed the situation to which we have 
already referred. But we remember his 
words only as a background to that sweep- 

29 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

ing revival which changed the face of 
England and put evangelical religion at the 
heart of its life. The worst moment turned 
out to be the moment just before that re- 
birth which saw the beginning of a new 
era. Historically it has been a dangerous 
thing to arrange for the obsequies of reli- 
gion. 

Will Christianity Rise Again? 

It is very important to have all this, and, 
indeed, very much more than this, in the 
background of our minds when we come to 
consider the situation in which we find our- 
selves. We have told only a little of the 
story, but we have outlined at least enough 
of it to suggest the amazing recuperative 
powers which are possessed by the Chris- 
tian faith. To-day once more the tide is 
ebbing. We are living in an age of unrest 
and confusion and disillusionment. And a 
good many noble spirits are fearing that 
Christianity will not rise triumphant from 
the wreck into which so much of con- 
temporary life has fallen. It will be worth 
our while to survey the situation some- 
what closely as we attempt to estimate the 

30 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

resources of the Christian religion in rela- 
tion to it. 

Before the outbreak of the Great War 
Rudolph Eucken had powerfully declared 
— it seems strange now to think of that 
declaration as coming from Germany and 
from a man who did not keep his own 
ethical vision clear in later days — that an 
externally splendid civilization was facing 
the tragedy of inner bankruptcy. The ex- 
ploitation of the forces of nature had filled 
the world of men with a sense of their own 
power. There was a world-wide assertive- 
ness, a proud confidence, in the very heart 
of it unchristian. It assumed that the 
man who can use the resources of nature 
does not need the resources of God. And 
so the hard and selfish optimism of the 
earlier part of the twentieth century 
seemed a wall against the approaches of 
all the deeper moral and spiritual realities. 
That brittle material self-satisfaction had 
to be shattered before there could be a 
hope of better things. The war and the 
after-war confusions have at least ac- 
complished that. We no more feel that 
pride in a mechanical civilization which so 

31 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

lately stirred our blood. We are begin- 
ning to fear that we have invented a mech- 
anism which will destroy us all at last. 
And it is important to recognize that the 
heart of contemporary pessimism is not 
merely a distrust of religion; it is a dis- 
trust of life itself. It will occur at once to 
some of us that a world-wide suspicion that 
civilization has the seed of decay in it, a 
world-wide distrust of the powers of man, 
is not a matter to dishearten the Christian. 
As a matter of fact, such experiences are 
preparing the soil for a new activity of re- 
ligion. The complacent age is the only age 
which Christianity cannot touch. 

In the latter part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the scientific method achieved a mas- 
tery of the mind of man which brought 
within the grasp of human thought a new 
world of knowledge. Watts Dunton, in his 
brilliant novel Aylwin, gave voice to the 
protest of those who feared that the sense 
of uniformity would quite destroy the sense 
of wonder, that the sense of impersonal 
forces would take the place of the appre- 
ciation of the creative mind of man. There 
is no need of avoiding the fact that many 

32 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

people came to live in a world from which 
they had banished the thought of freedom 
and initiative and all the rich play of the 
personal life. In such a world religion 
might be a program; it could scarcely be 
an inspiration. And in such a world the 
historic propulsions of the Christian reli- 
gion could scarcely find a place. But the 
really critical mind inevitably became 
aware of the necessity for considering the 
whole problem. Science must account for 
the scientist as well as his product. When 
you watch the scientist you see that even 
when he seems to be constructing a struc- 
ture which denies any place to freedom 
and the action of creative intelligence he is 
exercising the very qualities which he is 
denying. The greatest argument against 
the synthetic philosophy from this point of 
analysis is the synthetic philosophy. And 
so it has become evident to many men that 
science itself must include not only the im- 
personal forces, but must make room for 
personal activities. The final task of the 
human mind is not to explain the personal 
in the terms of the impersonal. It is to 
explain the impersonal in the terms of the 

33 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

personal. As this critical insight takes pos- 
session of a larger number of minds the 
way is being cleared for a new activity on 
the part of religion. 

The Christian Social Conscience 

The noblest aspects of contemporary life 
come into view when we begin to inspect 
the activities of the social conscience. The 
dream of society as an organism is possess- 
ing the minds of larger and larger num- 
bers of men. Sometimes, to be sure, there 
is a touch of moral evasiveness about it. 
There are men not a few who are willing 
to escape the necessity of repenting of their 
own sins by fastening all their attention on 
the sins of society. But while this is true, 
it is also true that a rich and glorious pas- 
sion for human betterment and for a hope- 
ful and happy life for all men moves in the 
activity of the social conscience to-day. 
We must frankly admit, however, that the 
social idealist is feeling the strain and the 
stress of terrible difficulties. The last 
three years have worn threadbare many of 
his watchwords, and his somewhat inno- 
cent and unsophisticated confidence in the 

34 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

possibility of securing great social returns 
has met with shattering disillusionment. 
Some men who were prophets of a better 
day have sunk into misanthropy and 
gloom. They have ceased to believe that 
society is capable of becoming organic. In 
the presence of their terrible gloom has the 
Christian religion a heartening word to 
say? The reply is that this disillusionment 
with a social hope not based upon recon- 
structed personality is just what the Chris- 
tian who understands the nature of man 
and the nature of religion would expect. 
From the beginning he has known that 
only as a brotherhood of personalities built 
into capacity for brotherhood by the Sa- 
viour of the world could men attain to 
anything like an ideal society. When a 
man who has only a social gospel becomes 
a cynic, at once the man who bases his 
social gospel upon the transforming work 
of Christ feels that he has an opportunity 
once more to secure a hearing. The con- 
temporary cynicism is an attitude which 
has ignored the Christian diagnosis of the 
disease which afflicts humanity, and has 
refused to use the Christian remedy. The 

35 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

failure of other prescriptions never discon- 
certs the Christian. 

An Inflated Verbal Currency 

One other aspect of the present situation 
deserves our attention. More and more 
are masses of men confident in their belief 
that the church has failed them. The 
scornful sense that it has inflated its verbal 
currency and has had no store of gold to 
justify its productivity in paper money has 
made its way almost everywhere. No 
doubt the church deserves much of this 
hostility. No doubt it has failed in moral 
strength, in spiritual insight, in practical 
brotherhood, in capacity for leadership, 
and in that intellectual acumen which 
really penetrates to the heart of a situa- 
tion. Even so we must insist that it has 
done more to keep the soul alive in the 
present day than any of its critics are 
ready to admit. And we must protest 
against that light-hearted condemnation 
which is based upon no study either of the 
difficulties which the church has con- 
fronted or of the stupendous services which 
it has rendered in spite of those difficulties. 

36 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

At once, however, we must declare that 
the root of the situation is not to be found 
here. Religion and an institution are not 
synonymous. "Church" and "Christian- 
ity" are not two different words for the 
same thing. No doubt there will be many 
heart-searching and even humiliating expe- 
riences in the process by which the church 
finds its way through these difficult days. 
But the very elements of failure in the 
activity of the church drive us back all 
the more surely to the sources of the Chris- 
tian religion. If an organization represents 
the living Christ incompletely or even with 
gross inadequacy, we find it all the more 
necessary to push aside the instrument and 
to reach the Master himself. The word of 
Browning's great poem is the word for the 
age: "See the Christ stand." 

What is the fashion, then, in which the 
flaming and assured evangel, which has 
been reborn into the life of so many ages, 
is to find the new contact with our own? 
How is our painfully weary and disheart- 
ened and misanthropic age to hear the 
glad tidings in such fashion that they shall 
sound forth with commanding authenticity? 

37 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

How is the solemn sanction of undeniable 
power to be given to the word which must 
be spoken to our age, "Behold your God"? 

"Place the Fire on the Hills" 

In the first place, all Christian people 
must begin to look at their resources and 
must refuse to be preoccupied merely with 
their liabilities. There are multitudes of 
quiet people who cherish the fire of God 
in their hearts. They have an assured and 
glowing relation to Christ even in these 
difficult days. We must make articulate 
all this wealth of moral and spiritual cer- 
tainty. The moment it becomes articulate 
it also becomes contagious. The fires burn- 
ing in men's hearts must be placed upon 
the hills of the world. Then our leaders 
must pay the price of a new and resilient 
and kindling relation to their Master and 
Lord. The moment of preoccupation with 
him and with his creative loving power is 
the moment when great creative and trans- 
forming energies begin to be realized in 
the life of the world. The eye flashes with 
unmistakable light, the voice thrills with 
certainty, and the evangel moves once 

38 



RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION 

more from life to life. Men and women 
and little children everywhere must be en- 
couraged to make the Christian religion a 
personal adventure of the spirit. So the 
song which the Franciscans sang over Eu- 
rope in the thirteenth century and which 
swept over England in the eighteenth cen- 
tury shall once more move over the land. 
With all this creative renewal of the inner 
life at every step the new life within must 
become a new life without. The new 
heart must become the new activity. The 
social program must be seized and revital- 
ized and made effective and triumphant by 
those who bring to it the resources of a 
vital contact with the Saviour of the world. x 
All this must be interpreted by minds 
sharp with all the powers of close analysis 
in the speech which our contemporary ex- 
perience has made compelling. And thus 
with a new spirit of prophecy and a new 
spirit of action based upon a new participa- 
tion in the energies released by the living 
Christ we shall go forth into that day 
which contains all for which we hope. The 
renaissance of religion will be an actuality 
in our hearts and before our eyes. 

39 



Ill 

THE DISILLUSIONMENTS OF A 
HUNDRED YEARS 

Yea, and for this very cause adding on your part 
all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in 
your virtue knowledge; and in your knowledge self- 
control; and in your self-control patience; and in 
your patience godliness; and in your godliness broth- 
erly kindness; and in your brotherly kindness love. — 
% Peter 1. 5, 6, 7. 

A little while ago an able Englishman 
of ample erudition and of a meditative 
habit of mind wrote a little book on the 
nineteenth century. He called it The Cen- 
tury of Hope. The glow of his own quiet 
and assured idealism was found in all its 
pages. It is fairly clear, however, that a 
good many people would find it impossible 
to use his title in a discussion of the last 
hundred years. It is significant that a 
capable New Englander, a descendant of 
two Presidents of the United States, wrote 
The Education of Henry Adams to show 
his utter distrust of the nineteenth century, 
and in an entirely different mood from the 

40 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

caustic cynicism of the first book wrote 
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to show his 
deep enthusiasm for the thirteenth century 
and all its wonderful unity of life and 
spirit. And even a mind much less accus- 
tomed to survey the last hundred years 
with hostile eyes than the distinguished 
Harvard professor is likely to be forced to 
admit that since 1815 the world has come 
upon one shock of disillusionment after 
another. 

Let us go over some of these sad and 
disheartening experiences, examining them 
quite candidly, attempting to see what 
they signify, and attempting too as we 
study them to find if there is a way in 
which we can keep both candor and hope, 
and go forward with sustained idealism to 
the tasks which confront us to-day and the 
endeavors which will clamor for our atten- 
tion to-morrow. We shall find the words 
we have used as a text to have deep im- 
portance for our discussion, but in the 
meantime we will go forward with our 
survey, allowing these words and their 
message to emerge when the right moment 
comes. 

4X 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

I. When Madame Roland cried, "O Lib- 
erty, what crimes are committed in thy 
name!" she gave voice to a feeling which 
was to have most powerful influence in the 
life of Europe in the years which were to 
follow. Europe became afraid of liberty. 
The years from 1815 to 1848, the years 
when that shrewd and wily politician Met- 
ternich dominated the life of the continent, 
were years when the fear of lawlessness 
made men tremble at the thought of free- 
dom. Europe had drunk deeply of the 
wine of revolution. It had felt the winds 
of a new day blowing all about it. Then 
there came the hour of reaction and bitter 
disillusionment. And for many years the 
hard and remorseless hand of reaction held 
it fast. Prince Metternich really owed all 
his power to this widespread disillusion- 
ment. He ruled by its fears a continent 
which had ceased to hope. The excesses 
of revolution had caused vast multitudes of 
men to prefer tyranny to anarchy. In such 
soil the mind of the sincere reactionary 
was developed. He is still alive in many a 
land, and he is becoming wonderfully ar- 
ticulate to-day. He has the ripened cyni- 

42 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

cisms of a hundred years as his heritage. 
He has fed on skepticism as regards the 
people and he has turned his fears into a 
philosophy of life. 

II. But after a while the preliminary 
reaction of the last century loosened its 
hold upon many a mind, and a great hope 
arose. This was the hope based upon po- 
litical democracy. Men began to think 
and dream and plan in the terms of the 
extension of the franchise. In England 
there came the reform bills of 1832, of 
1867, and many another piece of advanced 
legislation. Multitudes of men were swept 
by a great and generous enthusiasm. Up- 
lifting energies seemed to take possession of 
the human spirit. And the typical nine- 
teenth-century optimism found one of its 
most conspicuous expressions in the strug- 
gle and in the victory. There was some- 
thing Messianic about men's thought of 
political democracy. And many an eager 
spirit felt that here, indeed, was a cure for 
the ills of the world. Then at last came 
the bitter day of reaction and disillusion- 
ment. Political democracy achieved did 
not prove capable of bringing in the new 

43 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

era of which men dreamed. It was useful 
and it was important. But it did not re- 
make the world. Indeed, it became in- 
creasingly clear that political democracy 
itself may become a menace unless you can 
train the men who wield the power of the 
ballot to use it with discretion and with 
noble self-control. In America the mood 
of caustic disillusionment was given par- 
ticularly unhesitating expression by Mr. 
Brooks Adams in the volume, The Degra- 
dation of the Democratic Dogma. But 
everywhere it was clear that the thing of 
which men had thought as a panacea had 
no such powers as they had hoped. 

III. Then came the great wave of social 
passion. It swept in from many a deep of 
human compassion and carried multitudes 
by its own triumphant momentum. Kings- 
ley and Maurice had been early prophets. 
And the attempt to make the movement 
for a new social synthesis free from all 
play of feeling and a matter of mathemati- 
cal science had been made by Karl Marx 
in Das Capital. The movement was char- 
acterized by inner contradictions. Some- 
times it was hostile to religion. Sometimes 

44 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

it was the expression of religion. But the 
passion for social reconstruction became 
one of the master passions of the century. 
It inspired a vast literature. It was ex- 
pressed in international organizations. It 
kindled a new world-wide fire in men's 
eyes and a new enthusiasm in their hearts. 
But here and there signs began to appear 
that all was not well. And with the con- 
fusion in Russia the hour of world-wide 
disillusionment came. In every capital in 
the world there are weary-eyed men and 
women who were once ardent advocates of 
some method of social reconstruction, but 
who now feel that they have no gospel. 
The Messianic light has faded from their 
eyes. They are but shadowy spirits of 
hopelessness in a chaotic world. 

IV. In the meantime a different cult of 
(optimism had arisen in the world. The 
publication of Darwin's epoch-making 
works a little after the middle of the cen- 
tury, the coordinating activities of the 
mind of Herbert Spencer, the practical 
achievements of a multitude of scientists 
whom no man can number, the gradual 
production of a new scientific habit of 

45 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

mind led to a new sort of expectation. 
Science was to clear the world of super- 
I stition and to assume the Messianic role 
itself. There is no doubt in the world that 
a good deal of rubbish, intellectual and 
other, was gotten out of the way. And 
the practical application of the new scien- 
tific knowledge literally produced a new 
world in which men were to dwell. But 
the new powers while they increased man's 
capacity and extended the reach of his 
arm did not change human character. In 
fact, at last it appeared that all the poten- 
cies of the new age simply made the world 
a more terrible place unless something was 
done to the character of the man who 
exercised all these powers. If Russia had 
brought about disillusionment with social- 
ism, Germany completed the disillusion- 
ment with science. The new knowledge, 
wonderful as it was, did not produce a 
safe or happy world. 

V. Another parallel movement had 
seemed full of promise and, indeed, was 
not without substantial result. The nine- 
teenth century saw many noble and 
notable achievements on the part of evan- 

46 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

gelical religion. The contact of the indi- 
vidual human spirit with God in the 
richness and the transforming quality of | 
deep personal experience was back of some 
of the finest living and some of the noblest 
activity of the period. But the tendency 
which ignored the social implications of 
this individual experience and all the con- 
fusions of the mental transitions of the 
period and all the preoccupations with 
matters which appealed to the senses pro- 
duced a decline in this inner piety. To be 
sure, many notable circles all over the 
world preserved the old and beautiful tra- 
dition. But masses of people were com- 
pletely disillusioned as regards the potency 
of piety to solve the problems of the world. 
At any rate, it was clear that an inorganic 
piety was singularly helpless in the pres- 
ence of life's urgent demands. 

VI. With the coming of the war which 
engulfed us all one more outreach of the 
human spirit made itself felt. In many 
ages men had dreamed of world unity. 
Dante had put his own passionate belief in 
a world where peace was secure and the 
world was one into memorable expression in 

47 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

his Latin work De Monarchia. And since 
his day many had dreamed the great 
dream. But now men began to think of 
these things with a new and understanding 
seriousness. It seemed that civilization it- 
self could only be saved by some sort of 
generous and democratic organization of 
the whole world. President Woodrow Wil- 
son made the movement the vehicle of his 
own deeply serious purpose and became its 
recognized voice. A wave of hope swept 
over all the world. With a wistful eager- 
ness people in old and weary lands looked 
toward the new world and listened to the 
vibrant masterful voices which it was send- 
ing forth. Then came the armistice. Then 
came the Peace Conference. Then came 
the most complete disillusionment of all. 
s The sordid selfishnesses swept aside the 
fresh idealisms and the world woke on a 
dull gray morning to find itself held in the 
grasp of rude and ruthless actualities upon 
which no sunlight fell. 

It is in such a situation and with such ex- 
perience behind us that we must meet the 
problem of living. Is there any way to find 
creative inspiration in the midst of such 

48 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

shattering disillusionment and such bitter 
failure of our hopes? As we examine the 
situation more closely we begin to see that 
the tragedy of the century just gone was the 
peril of the isolated virtue. Group after 
group of men depended upon some one 
movement, upon some one panacea, and 
each one of them failed. Just because of 
their isolation they failed. It is not the in- 
dividual virtue which has complete potency. 
It is not the partial movement which can ' 
save the world. It is the cluster of virtues 
which will make character. It is the syn- 
thesis of the good in all really forward-looking 
movements which will save the world. 

And now we are ready for our text. The 
author of the epistle from which these 
words were taken had a splendid flash of 
insight. Faith was not enough. Virtue 
was not enough. Temperance was not 
enough. Patience was not enough. God- 
liness was not enough. Brotherly kindness 
was not enough. Charity was not enough. 
Not these isolated qualities, but all of them 
taken together were to make the complete 
Christian man. It requires long and bitter 
experience to deliver us from the fallacy 

49 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

of the isolated virtue. It is only when we 
think organically that we think safely, and 
the author of the Epistle called the Second 
Epistle General of Peter has blazed the 
way through many a problem by calling 
our attention to the possibility of gathering 
together the separate items of good into 
an invincible unity. 

When we apply this principle to the cen- 
tury just gone and to the time which lies 
ahead its significance is clear. Liberty 
alone is not enough. Political democracy 
alone is not enough. Social passion alone 
is not enough. Scientific achievement 
alone is not enough. Evangelical piety 
alone is not enough. The vision of inter- 
national unity alone is not enough. It is 
when we get all these together in organic 
relations that we begin to have a new 
hope of creative achievement. And the 
century ahead is to be a century of achieve- 
ment through the synthesis of great move- 
ments even as the century out of which we 
are passing saw such failure through the 
mood of dependence upon the virtue of a 
single movement. Of these movements we 
may say: "United they stand. Divided 

50 



THE DISILLUSIONMENTS 

they fall." When we gather into noble 
unity the potency of individual piety, the 
richness of social passion, the practical 
power of scientific achievement, the op- 
portunities of political democracy, the life 
of a freedom mastered by character and 
of an international vision realized by 
means of tested scientific principles, then 
we will secure that quality of life which 
does not lead to reaction and disillusion- 
ment, but unfolds in larger and larger 
realms of satisfying achievement. 

As we look forward to such synthetic 
activity one commanding figure comes 
more and more to dominate our thinking 
and our acting. For while many things 
may be said of the Founder of the Chris- 
tian religion, few go farther in giving an 
account of his permanent appeal than just 
the marvelous fashion in which he gathered 
into his own life things which in tragic iso- 
lation had failed to come to beauty or to 
power but united in him made up the 
wonder of a perfect life. Even so he will 
teach us to add the good of many move- 
ments into that unity which shall indeed 
renew the life of the world. 

51 



IV 
THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

All things are yours. — 1 Corinthians 3. 21. 

Paul was a first-century Jew. He was 
in process of being made into a Christian 
cosmopolitan who might claim citizenship 
in any century. He was perpetually loyal 
to a certain creative type of life and to a 
set of facts and principles and interpreta- 
tions upon which that life depended. And 
all the while his mind was moving in larger 
and larger circles of appreciation and ap- 
propriation. The daring generosity of his 
spirit is never more dramatically expressed 
than in the words: "The world, or life, or 
death, or things present, or things to come 
— all are yours." The new life in Christ, 
he saw clearly, was to appropriate every 
deep and real and potent and nobly vital 
I thing in human experience. His sharp and 
definite sense of the nature and require- 
ments of his Christian loyalty was only 
equalled by the sweep of his vision as he 

52 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

included every good thing in the heritage 
of the Christian. 

It is a long journey from the first cen- 
tury of Paul to the seventeenth century 
and the powerful Puritan leaders and the* 
daring Pilgrims. The solid strength and 
steellike organization of the Roman Em- 
pire have long passed away. Feudalism 
has made its attempt to change anarchy 
in order. The dream of the Holy Roman 
Empire has been dreamed, and popes and 
emperors have fought for world supremacy. 
Great nations have arisen with a sharp 
and clear sense of nationality. The new 
learning and the new taste and the new 
consciousness of God alive in the soul of f 
man have changed the life of Europe. 
Men have gone back to Greece to find the 
meaning of beauty; they have gone back 
to Jerusalem to find the meaning of reli- 
gion, as they had gone back to Rome to 
find the meaning of law. The church as 
an organization has met in battle array the 
church as a living Spirit. The Hundred 
Years' War has told its tale of struggle 
between England and France. Spain has 
emerged, and the menace of a world con- 

53 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

trolled by a Spain controlled by Rome has 
been met in the memorable sea fight with 
the invincible Armada. The new and 
glorious consciousness of the meaning of 
the national life has found brilliant expres- 
sion in England in the whole period of the 
Tudor s. And Shakespeare has turned the 
meaning of it all into words of immortal 
beauty, in which English history has a 
vivid and commanding expression and the 
English spirit is poured forth in a classic 
form of its own. Then the Tudors pass 
and the Stuarts appear. The century of 
glorified national solidarity passes and the 
century of the assertion of the individual 
in England appears. 

There had been sounds which had an 
ominous quality of their own during the 
reign of Elizabeth. But the brilliancy of 
her reign and the sense of danger from 
Rome and the passionate national spirit 
had held most of England to hearty accord 
with the mood of solidarity in church and 
state. The seventeenth century was to be 
the period of a new sense of the individual 
and the right of his deepest life for un- 
hindered expression. In certain ways it 

64 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

was not a century of the profoundest life. 
As we look back on the whole period we 
see that on the surface at least it received 
its tone from the urbane and distinguished 
Court of Louis XIV. If the sixteenth cen- 
tury had been a time of new religious life 
and new national spirit in Europe, the 
seventeenth century became a time when 
good taste seemed to very many people 
much more important than good morals. 
Even the typical preachers were masters 
of rhetoric, whose sense of a fine and tell- 
ing phrase was the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of their preaching. Life flowed in 
a tide which was full and passionate. And I 
under all the urbanity there was a hot and 
untamed spirit. Yet it was in this very 
age that religion spoke a new word in 
Pietism in Germany and in all the move-' 
ments of the Puritans and Separatists in 
England. The heart of the movements in 
England was a consciousness that the new 
life in Christ has rights which must never 
be denied by any power. The Puritan 
tried to secure a church which would not 
dwarf or check the full quality of Christian 
thinking and living. The Separatist de- 

55 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

parted from the church because he be- 
lieved that he had fallen upon a time when 
the church did not have room for Chris- 

1 tianity. The practical method of the two 
types differed. Their fundamental desire 
was the same. The church must be made 
safe for Christianity, or else new churches 

, must be formed which could be genuinely 
Christian. There was a tremendous asser- 
tion of liberty. But it was never an empty 
liberty. It was liberty to give the deepest 
and most commanding vitalities of human 
experience an opportunity to function. For 
its sake John Robinson and his friends 
went to Holland. For its sake the men of 
the Mayflower went to New England. In 
its name the deepest and most far-reaching 
work of the commonwealth was done. 
The men who cherish and represent the 

\ Puritan tradition to-day have two tasks. 
One is a task of conservation. The other 
is a task of appropriation. Like Paul, they 
must be loyal to the deepest genius of their 
own life. And, like Paul, they must wel- 
come that great treasure which they can 
make their own and give the impress of 
their own spirit. To them too comes the 

56 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

message, "All things are yours." And they 
are to test and utilize the best which life 
offers to them as well as to maintain un- 
tarnished their own high tradition. There 
are, I think, at least three elements of 
conservation and three elements of appro- 
priation in this ampler Puritanism. 

I. First, there is the tradition of liberty. 
Already it has had notable expression. It 
has become the foundation of states and 
the guiding star of churches. It was as an 
American citizen that Lowell wrote: 

"They were rude men, unlovely, yes, but great, 
Who prayed about the cradle of our state. 
Small room for light and sentimental strains 
In those lean men with empires in their brains, 
Who pitched a state as other men pitch tents, 
And led the march of time to great events." 

It has been a long and difficult lesson, 
this lesson of freedom. And the world has 
by no means entirely mastered it yet. The 
man who thinks only of solidarity con- 
fronts the man who thinks only of license, 
and sometimes it is hard enough for the 
man who believes in orderly freedom to 
make himself heard. But the belief in the 
uncoerced mind, and the conviction that 

57 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

only willing allegiance is the highest sort 
of commitment, have entered very deeply 
into the thought of men. To be sure, this 
liberty is not liberty to destroy civiliza- 
| tion. It is not liberty to break down the 
basal moral sanctions. We must be hon- 
est enough to recognize that even a world 
built about the idea of freedom must have 
police protection from the hard and re- 
morseless will which is bent upon destruc- 
tion. And, on the other hand, our fear of 
lawlessness must never be made an excuse 
for the surrender of essential liberties. 
There are men who are so afraid of anarchy 
that they have lost their fear of tyranny. 
The spirit of Puritanism is a spirit of law- 
abiding liberty. It will fight against 
tyranny and it will fight against lawless- 
ness. And that spirit must be kept alive 
in the world. 

II. Then there is the Puritan tradition 
of a life which may be trusted with free- 
dom. When a man calls for liberty it is 
well to lift the question, Liberty for what? 
The Puritan wanted liberty because of 
great and living convictions which were 
pressing outward from his mind and were 

58 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

throbbing in his heart. The life of God 
in the soul of man was such a reality that 
it was necessary to make room for it. 
Jonathan Edwards was a stern and re- 
morseless logician. But all his logic was 
in the name of a tremendous and compel- 
ling experience of contact with God. And 
the Puritan at his best in both hemispheres 
has been a man with so mastering a reli- 
gious life that everything else must be 
organized about it. And he never forgot 
that great and far-reaching corollaries 
flowed from it. But all his thinking and 
all his practices in things ecclesiastical and 
in his varied human relations were brought 
at last to the test provided by this en- 
thronement of religion at the center of his 
life. Whenever the cry for freedom be- 
comes a demand to be allowed to do every- 
thing in general because there is nothing in 
particular which has become commanding 
to the mind and the conscience and the 
heart, it is an empty and impotent thing. 
But when freedom is the opportunity for 
men and churches to be true to their own 
deepest intuitions and their own most pro- 
found experience of the things of God, it 

69 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

is saved from all superficial quality. The 
liberty of indifference is replaced by the 
liberty of mighty convictions. Freedom is 
only a name unless it is an opportunity for 
the life of God in the soul of man to be- 
come articulate. 

III. The third thing which must be con- 
served as the Puritan does his work in the 
world of to-day is the tradition of beauty. 
Now, there are a good many people, it 
must be admitted, who do not know that 
there is a Puritan tradition of beauty. 
They think of Puritanism as the foe of 
beauty, and, indeed, as its destroyer. This 
comes partly from incomplete knowledge 
and partly from a preoccupation with that 
expression of Puritan life which was a 
sharp and terrible reaction from all the 
vice and lawlessness of the Restoration. 
That there have been unlovely Puritans is 
all too true. That the deepest tradition of 
Puritanism involves hostility to beauty is 
entirely false. If one puts the Puritanism 
of John Milton over against the Puritan- 
ism of bitter men who sunk into misan- 
thropy after the cruel disillusionments of 
the Restoration, it is possible at once to 

60 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

get the matter in right perspective. There 
have never been written in our splendid 
old English speech lines of more haunting 
beauty, of more sonorous dignity, of more 
classic urbanity than many of the lines 
written by John Milton. And in these 
matters we must go to Milton for the de- 
fining meaning of the Puritan tradition. 
That spirit of cosmopolitan Christian eager- 
ness which is at the heart of a Christianity 
conscious of the range of its own meaning 
goes into the realm of beauty and of charm, 
and there claims every high and noble and 
permanent thing as its own. In the deep- 
est sense, indeed, righteousness and beauty 
must kiss each other. For it is only the 
beauty which is righteous which can con- 
tinue permanently to be a part of the life 
of man. All other beauty has the seed of 
decay in it. To be sure, this does not 
mean that the sense of beauty must be- 
come self-conscious. It does mean that in 
the happiest and most spontaneous way it 
is to be recognized that the creative forces 
of the Christian religion are the really 
creative forces in the realm of beauty as 
well. All things are ours. And the things 

61 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

of beauty are to find their highest inter- 
pretation in the Christian faith, and their 
most notable expression in Christian art. 
It is true that this was known before the 
rise of Puritanism, as many a painting 
whose colors pulsate with genius tells us, 
and as Gothic ecclesiastical architecture so 
abundantly testifies. But it is also true 
that at its best Puritanism appropriated 
this tradit on and made it its own. And 
it is a matter of the highest importance 
that we should make it our own to-day. 

IV. If these things are to be conserved 
as a part of the contemporary life of an 
ampler Puritanism, it is also true that there 
are some things to be appropriated by a 
spirit which claims all deep and noble 
things as its own. The seventeenth cen- 
tury was followed by the eighteenth. The 
vital energies of life seemed to be dried up 
and only the hard husk to remain. It was 
the century of Deism, with its belief in the 
absent God and the self-sufficient man. 
Puritanism seemed to have come upon a 
cold and barren scholasticism of its own. 
Then it was that a certain precise little 
Oxford scholar and another man of Ox- 

62 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

ford, the second with a titanic and sweep- 
ing gift of eloquence, moved about Eng- 
land with the fire of a new evangel in their 
hearts and upon their lips. And once again 
lights began to gleam everywhere. Once 
again the warm and glowing hearth-fire 
became the portion of the religious life of 
England. The creative energies of religion 
were released all over the nation. It is not 
too much to say that the great revival 
found one England and left another. And 
over the sea the new Republic was bap-j 
tized in its fire. It can hardly be said with 
too eager an emphasis that every deep and 
permanent element of the great revival 
must be made a part of the living Puritan 
tradition which moves out to do its work 
in the world to-day. There were unessen- 
tial features. There were unlovely fea- 
tures. But at the heart of it the great 
revival is the expression of elements of 
power which are essential to a living 
church. The heart comes to its own in the 
great revival. In spite of excesses it may 
be said that in a noble sense the emotions 
come to their own. The immediate con- 
sciousness of God at work in the human 

63 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

spirit becomes the actual possession of 
men. Now, the clear and incisive intel- 
lectuality of the Puritan tradition and the 
warm and glowing energy of the great re- 
vival really belong together. They sup- 
plement each other. And the accent of the 
great revival must be made a permanent 
part of the Puritan tradition. 

V. The eighteenth century moved by 
and at last went to its long home. Then 
came the nineteenth century. It was a 
time of manifold life, a time tempting one 
to prolonged analysis. But perhaps from 
the searchingly Christian view the most 
important matter was the development 
of a new social consciousness. The dream 
of brotherhood captured the imagination of 
men. Some things were inherited from the 
French Revolution, with its undisciplined 
idealisms. Some things came as a result 
of the action of the Christian conscience 
dealing with industrial and economic con- 
ditions. Some things came from the sharp 
and critical analysis of brilliant thinkers 
like Karl Marx. But, taken all in all, the 
world became a place with an absolutely 
new conscience as regards man's duty to 

64 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

man. The church at length made the so-t 
cial conscience its own. Indeed, as we 
have already intimated, it had a share in 
creating it. And by the end of the cen- 
tury the social passion had become the 
dominant note in much powerful preach- 
ing and the commanding inspiration in the i 
activities of many churches. Indeed, in 
some cases, religion ceased to be a com- 
munion with God, and became a program 
for new relations among men. The wisest 
men combined the two notes. Men like 
Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, made the vitali- 
ties of religion as potent inner communion 
nobly authentic at the very moment when 
they were giving themselves to the tasks 
of social regeneration. The men of com- 
pletest insight saw that the social passion 
offers a fuller expression of the enthusiasms 
of religion and not a substitute for its inner 
dynamic. And it seems very clear that the 
social note must be made a permanent 
part of the Puritan tradition. Sanitation 
is not a substitute for salvation, but it is 
one of its inevitable expressions. The 
church dominated by the ampler Puritan 
ideal is the perpetual ally of all the forces 

65 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

which make for real brotherhood in the 
life of the world. We have spoken of 
this as something which the Puritan is to 
appropriate. And this is true. But we 
must not forget that if Dale were here he 
would insist that in its greatest days in the 
past Puritanism was inspired by the idea 
of the reign of Christ in all human relation- 
ships. We may frankly admit that the 
social passion has real points of contact 
with the Puritan life of the past. At the 
same time we may see clearly that the 
nineteenth century offered a new emphasis 
which the ampler Puritanism must make 
its own. 

VI. The men who sailed in the May- 
flower were more interested in finding room 
for a type of life than in molding the world 
after the fashion of their ideals. They 
thought more of escape than of conquest, 
though doubtless many of them realized 
that if the life which they cherished could 
be kept in the world, it would have a 
career of triumph at last. It is already 
possible to realize that the outstanding 
note of the twentieth century is its con- 
I sciousness of the unity of the life of the 

66 



THE AMPLER PURITANISM 

world. True it is that more than a cen- 
tury ago the missionary enterprise began. 
But to-day the world sees the meaning of 
all its subtle connections as it has never 
seen them before. The world cannot con- 
tinue part slave and part free. The life of; 
the world must be organized for interna- 
tional safety and obedience to the behests 
of international law. The questions of 
economics and industry must be solved by 
a world organized to deal with them. The 
great questions must all be seen in the 
light of the necessities of the whole of 4 
humanity. This does not mean a repudia- 
tion of national ties. It does mean that 
patriotism is a living part of a larger con- 
sciousness which apprehends the whole 
human problem. Already it is clear that 
the man of the Puritan tradition is ready 
and eager to make his own this new world- 
consciousness. With wistful eyes he looks 
over the torn and bewildered world which 
the war has left behind, and beyond it all he 
sees his vision of a world finding unity in^ 
the new life in Christ. That life for which 
the Pilgrims braved the sea is to relate 
itself to every human problem, and is to 

67 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

be the most defining element among the 
forces which will make the world one at 
last. 

The Puritan of to-day accepts the chal- 
lenging word of Paul. He believes that all 
things do belong to him. From his own 
past he uplifts the tradition of liberty 9 the 
sense of a life so mastered by God that it 
can be trusted with liberty, and the haunt- 
ing dream of beauty made Christian. 
From the eighteenth century he appro- 
priates the vital meaning of the great 
revival, from the nineteenth century he 
appropriates a consuming social passion, 
and from the twentieth century he appro- 
priates a new consciousness of the unity of 
humanity. So he creates that ampler Puri- 
tanism which is ready for the tasks of the 
turbulent, summoning world in which we 
dwell. 



68 



A NATION OF READERS 

And they stood up in their place, and read in the 
book of the law of Jehovah their God a fourth part 
of the day. — Nehemiah 9. 3. 

It was said of Lord Acton, the great 
English scholar, that he read during more 
than half of his waking hours. Here we 
read of a national assembly which spent a 
fourth part of the day, reading the book 
of the law of the Lord their God. The 
reader has always been able to claim a 
certain distinction among his fellows. Men 
have instinctively felt that he had pushed 
out his horizons, and that he brought a 
mind of ample power and fuller knowledge 
than they to the problems which confront 
all the children of men. But reading has 
usually been an aristocratic art. It has 
belonged to the few. It has not been the 
glad activity of the many. The invention 
of printing did something to change all 
this. The era of the inexpensive book did 
more. Now there was actual access on the 

69 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

part of the many to the masterpieces of the 
world. The era of popular education has 
prepared the man for the book as the era 
of inexpensive printing has prepared the 
book for the man. 

The result has not been, however, the 
universal reading of great books. It has 
been a world-wide creation of books which 
are not great to fit the immediate demand 
of minds which have not expanded to the 
consideration of the noblest issues. There 
has been too much of the neurotic exploita- 
tion of the common mind by the hectic 
book. And there has been too much con- 
tentment on the part of masses of men 
with books which are vivid without being 
dependable. Too much men have read 
that which reflected the mass prejudice 
rather than that which educated the com- 
mon mind. And multitudes of men have 
become readers of headlines rather than 
readers of books. Democracy is not the 
bringing of everybody down to a low level, 
that all may live in the sad equality of the 
depths. It is the bringing of everybody to 
a lofty level, that all may share the noble 
equality of the heights. Only with such a 

70 



A NATION OF READERS 

democracy is a nation safe, for only in 
such a country can men be trusted with 
the momentous decisions which must be 
made by the citizens of a Republic. 

We are to consider this morning what 
will happen to a country if in this noble 
sense its people become a nation of readers. 
We cannot gather together in a vast hun- 
dred-million assembly to hear the reading 
of the law. But each of us can read the 
supreme books about the supreme subjects. 
And as it comes to pass that we do this, 
what will be the result? 

In the first place, the nation will come 
to be characterized by a new unity. One 
man can know only a few other men at 
best. One man can know intimately only 
a few places at best. But we can all know 
the same great books. We can all receive 
the stimulus and the inspiration of the 
same great ideas. We can all think the 
same great thoughts. We can all attain to 
the greatness of sharing in a noble national 
mind. This does not mean the crushing of 
individual initiative. It does not mean the 
discouraging of originality. It does mean 
the securing of a great common founda- 

71 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

tion of thought and feeling. It means such 
a common fund of facts and ideas that a 
speaker and a writer can be sure of appeal- 
ing to an understanding mind. This sort 
of mental unity is one of the matters of 
most strategic importance in our national 
life. When we all know the great thinkers 
and the great poets and the great inter- 
preters the walls which separate us will 
begin to fall. That telling line from Shake- 
speare will meet with a universal response, 
that notable paragraph from Milton will 
rouse a whole audience, that suddenly 
quoted phrase from Isaiah will come with 
a new impact upon the minds of men. Art, 
religion, politics, and even commerce will 
reach a new potency through this unity of 
mental life. Men will not address millions 
of minds walled up in the loneliness of 
petty and provincial knowledge and sur- 
rounded by vast tracts of ignorance. They 
will address a common mind in words 
which all men are ready to receive and 
understand. 

The nation of readers will not only at- 
tain a new unity; it will attain a new 
knowledge. Two thirds of men's wrong 

72 



A NATION OF READERS 

opinions come from ignorance. We need 
to be deluged with facts. And we need to 
have these facts at last so classified and 
stored away in our mind that we know 
where to find them and can see them in 
their relations and in their significance. 
The greatest danger in all questions of race 
and religion is that men shall decide before 
they know the facts. In a democracy the 
people must decide. And it is a particu- 
larly dangerous situation when ardent 
party feeling rather than dependable 
knowledge is the basis of the decision. The 
nation of readers will learn to weigh, to 
consider, and to reach conclusions in the 
light of all the evidence. In a republic 
the whole nation constitutes a vast jury. 
The whole nation must hear the case. The 
whole nation must render the verdict. And 
only a nation trained to read widely and to 
think impartially is ready for this high 
demand. 

Here we come upon the menace of that 
writing which is a brilliant perversion of 
the facts. The man who has mental agility 
rather than mental honesty, and who uses 
deft persuasion rather than fair-minded ar- 

73 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

gument, becomes less and less a menace 
in a country where the citizens quietly and 
patiently insist upon getting all the signifi- 
cant facts and quite refuse to be swept off 
their feet by adroit watchwords and sud- 
den appeals to prejudice. The universal 
diffusion of knowledge as to every vital 
matter gives a new solidity to the struc- 
ture of a republic. 

The nation of readers has before it some- 
thing more than unity and knowledge. It 
comes at length to that strong and mellow 
quality of mind which we call wisdom. 
You can tell a great deal about a man if 
you know what he takes for granted. You 
can tell a great deal about a nation if you 
know what it takes for granted. Some 
things must be permanently settled if there 
is to be real progress. And the nation of 
readers busy with great and noble and fun- 
damental books about great themes comes 
to understand the foundations upon which 
its life rests and the assumptions which are 
a part of its very organization. It becomes 
possessed of that long and rich tradition of 
contemplation regarding the life and ac- 
tivities of men which is the very essence 

u 



A NATION OF READERS 

of the culture of the world. And seeing 
new problems in this large perspective it is 
saved from a thousand pitfalls. It tears 
the disguises from multitudes of clever 
make-believes and recognizes old foes in 
many new faces. It has the wisdom of 
experience as well as the vigor of youth. 
It profits by the successes and the failures 
of the past. It sees the intellectual and 
moral and religious foundations of all stable 
life. And it holds them secure. 

The next step is natural and in a sense 
inevitable. The nation of readers of the 
ripest and noblest books not only achieves 
unity and knowledge and wisdom. It goes 
on to achieve character. To be sure, at 
this point the will as well as the mind is 
involved. It is perfectly possible for a 
man to use all the passwords without un- 
derstanding them. It is possible for a 
man to read the great books and master 
their phrases without entering with per- 
sonal sympathy into their meaning. A 
cynic was once described as a man who 
knows the price of everything and the 
value of nothing. It is possible for a man 
to know market values in the realm of 

75 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

books without knowing their moral values 
or their spiritual worth. But whenever 
there is personal response to the great 
books of the world men will go from knowl- 
edge to wisdom and all the while will be 
growing in character. When the best 
which great books have to give ceases to 
be a set of ideas in your mind and becomes 
a set of purposes dominating your will, 
there is the actual emerging of character as 
distinct from culture. The nation of read- 
ers will become a nation of men and women 
seeking to bring the best ideas into life and 
not to leave them in stately repose in li- 
braries. So the splendid activity of a new 
national character will begin. 

There is one step more which we must 
take. Unity and knowledge, wisdom and 
character form a noble combination. But 
the nation of readers will develop in an- 
other aspect. It will become a nation with 
a lofty and beautiful and productive spirit- 
ual life. You cannot read widely, and 
surely you cannot read deeply, without be- 
ginning to hear the sound of the moving 
tides of the life of the Spirit. As you read 

a noble book you are like a child holding a 

76 



A NATION OF READERS 

shell to its ear. Already there is the echo 
of the majestic movement of the exhaust- 
less sea. You cannot go very deeply into 
anything until you come upon spiritual 
meaning and spiritual value. The great 
voices of the world all know Spiritual wist- 
fulness and some of them ring with the 
wonder of deep spiritual satisfaction. 

The seen always leads to the unseen. 
The visible always moves on to the in- 
visible. The contemplation of man's expe- 
rience in the world at last brings to light 
the passionate outreach of the human 
spirit after God. 

And the greatest books do more than 
echo man's far call for God. They pour 
forth the passion of God's call for man 
arid they express and interpret the glory 
of the life of man and God together in 
high companionship. You cannot confine 
Jesus Christ to a book. But he speaks 
from a book. He speaks from many books 
and he brings to its full and final human 
satisfaction the spiritual life. The nation 
of readers may wander over many alluring 
experiences. But it comes at last to one 
great Coronation, the crowning of Jesus as 

77 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

Lord of the spiritual life and interpreter 
and master of all the aspirations and ac- 
tivities of men. 

Unity and knowledge, wisdom and char- 
acter, and the fine flowers of a fruitful 
spirituality — all these are found in the 
highways of that land which develops a 
nation of readers heartily responsive to the 
highest words spoken in the great books 
of the world. 

So at last the nation of readers finds 
itself standing in reverent awe before the 
law of the Lord its God. Then the great 
and wonderful miracle is wrought. Men 
hear the law of right and loving living. 
They see the law alive and human and 
genuinely divine in Jesus. They receive 
it all into their minds. They put it into 
command of their wills. They open their 
hearts to its meaning. And at last what 
spelled itself out in a book becomes alive 
as the deepest thing in their own personal 
experience. The new Covenant is written 
in their hearts. And so law itself is trans- 
figured in the gladness of a great devotion. 

Does the picture sound Utopian? If it 
does, the best life consists in taking things 

78 



A NATION OF READERS 

out of the Utopia of dreams and fitting 
them into the structure of history. We 
know that the thing has happened to indi- 
viduals. And every time one man or one 
woman walks in the highways we have 
described the nation is a little nearer the 
high destiny to which it is called. 



79 



VI 
THE PRESS AND THE COMMUNITY 

The wise man's eyes are in his head, and the fool 
walketh in darkness. — Ecclesiastes 2. 14. 

There is a good deal of shrewd cynicism 
in the book of Ecclesiastes. Someone has 
called it the cellar of the Old Testament. 
There is also a good deal of the insight 
which comes from close observation. The 
cutting little epigram which we have just 
read is an illustration of the insight. The 
wise man's eyes are in his head, declares 
this old philosopher, but the fool does not 
use his eyes at all. He simply walks about 
in the dark. That is to say, the difference 
between wisdom and folly is found in that 
knowledge of what is going on which comes 
to a man who uses his eyes constantly and 
skillfully. 

In our complex modern world, however, 
a man simply cannot see all that he ought 
to know about the great movement of life 
which is going on all the while about him. 
However keen his powers of observation, 

80 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

he must supplement his own eyes by the 
eyes of others. And as all the world be- 
comes tied together in the bonds of a com- 
mon life he must find alert eyes which 
move for him up and down and through 
the earth. It is here that the newspapers 
serve him. It is here that the press serves 
the community. 

The newspaper gives a community eyes 
to see itself and to see the world. The 
newspaper gives a community ears to hear 
itself and to hear the whole world as it 
moves about its vast and intricate busi- 
ness of living. The newspaper gives a 
community a voice by which it may be- 
come effectively articulate. It will be 
worth our while to consider this morning 
the fashion in which newspapers function 
in our bustling American cities and the 
fashion in which they may become more 
effective exponents of those principles 
which are essential to the stability of our 
American life. 

I. It is the first task of the newspaper 
to reflect the life of the community. 

The reader of the paper wants to know, 
first of all, exactly what is happening. 

81 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

Accuracy is the heart of the first com- 
mandment for newspaper men. It is the 
genius of the second commandment for 
newspaper men. It is the principle back 
of the third commandment for newspaper 
men. All sorts of things can be forgiven in 
the paper which lies upon your breakfast 
table. But the habit of carelessness as to 
facts, the habit of inaccuracy is the thing 
which will leave a man at last without that 
basis of confidence which is the stock upon 
which the newspaper must depend. There 
is no question in the world about the reali- 
zation of this situation by newspaper men. 
And the general public probably has very 
little realization of the care which is taken 
by great numbers of large newspapers and 
by many small ones in respect of this mat- 
ter. There is an amount of expert skill 
invested in the endeavor to get facts which 
is worthy of the highest praise. 

II. The newspaper which gives the com- 
munity a false picture of itself. 

There is no newspaper which tells only 
falsehoods. Such a paper, of course, could 
not survive. There is no brilliantly suc- 
cessful newspaper which does not have 

82 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

areas in which it tries to give an exact 
and constantly scrupulous loyalty to the 
facts just as they are. A newspaper sur- 
vives by its virtues. But sometimes these 
virtues form a protective covering to its 
vices. There are a good many ways in 
which it is possible to give a false picture 
of the life of the community. It is possible 
to use headlines which give one impression 
and in smaller type to give a really ac- 
curate account of that which has tran- 
spired. And as multitudes of Americans 
read only headlines this becomes a very 
dangerous and sinister kind of deception. 
It is possible to print an early rumor as if 
it were an assured fact and the legitimate 
desire to be first in the field makes this a 
particularly constant temptation. Scare 
heads on the front page on one day and a 
correction in small type on an inner page 
at a later day have characterized even 
papers of reputation in times of intense 
crisis. The process of the selection of the 
material to be printed, in other words, of 
deciding what is news, offers abundant op- 
portunity to create a false impression. By 
omitting to refer at all to matters which 

83 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

are of vital concern to the whole com- 
munity a paper can in effect give a false 
picture of the life it is expected accurately 
to reflect. The best men in the profession 
have the keenest apprehension of these 
dangers. And many a battle of which the 
public never knew has been fought to get 
a dependable and unbiased account to the 
readers of the community. But the very 
existence of these dangers makes it neces- 
sary for the public to be vigilant. The 
reliable newspaper man must be made to 
feel that he has a watchful and ready 
body of alert men and women who are 
with him in all his endeavors. 

III. The newspaper which interprets the 
community. 

The first business of the newspaper is to 
bring the news to its constituency. Its 
second business is to interpret the news. 
And this is not merely a matter of edi- 
torial columns. Many a paper which pro- 
fesses to give most loyalty to the 
unvarnished truth manages to do an enor- 
mous amount of varnishing by means of 
its placing of the news and by means of 
its headlines. There has been an enormous 

84 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

development of the news paragraph which 
is, in fact, propaganda. Now, a certain 
amount of interpretation is necessary and 
wise. But when papers are filled with 
news articles with telling headlines calcu- 
lated to produce the impression that a 
certain law cannot be enforced and when 
this continues with a cumulative vigor 
even the unsophisticated mind discovers at 
last that propaganda has taken the place 
of the purveying of the news. The ob- 
servant reader of American newspapers will 
observe with interest how in certain papers 
and groups of papers there are periodical 
drives in which editorial and news columns 
are coordinated with tremendous skill for 
producing a particular effect. During the 
war this sort of interpretation was often 
used in a noble way with the highest of 
motives. The press has, indeed, the func- 
tion of helping the stable and honest and 
forward-looking elements of the community 
to become conscious of the meaning of their 
own life and of the significance for the 
character of the community of the events 
which are recorded. But the interpretation 
ought to be held with care to the editorial 

85 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

page and the news articles should give a 
perfectly clear statement of exactly those 
facts and those utterances which are in 
opposition to the editorial position of the 
paper. 

IV. The newspaper which misinterprets 
the community. 

It must already have become clear that 
interpretation is a very dangerous weapon. 
And one must confess that there is such a 
thing as the constant and adroit misinter- 
pretation of a community and its life on 
the part of a newspaper. Expert studies of 
publicity have shown that in certain indus- 
trial crises there were influential news- 
papers which published not an account of 
what occurred but an account of what cer- 
tain groups would like to have occur. To 
be sure, this sort of thing in the end defeats 
itself, for it becomes a matter of general 
knowledge. But the day of disillusionment 
can be long deferred, especially if a large 
majority of the readers desire the thing to 
be true which they read. In these cases 
when at last the methods which have been 
pursued come to be understood there is a 
loss of prestige which it is indeed difficult 

86 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

to regain. At this point the reader as well 
as the supplier of news is often guilty of a 
very unfortunate attitude. When all read- 
ers learn to read with patient care things 
which they do not like to admit to be true 
it will be easier for the men of the press to 
tell the whole truth. 

V. The newspaper which guides the com- 
munity. 

There is a very notable sense in which a 
newspaper can attain to community leader- 
ship. As the days and months and years 
go by the community comes to know a 
particular management with a fairly shrewd 
appraisement. And the policy of honesty 
and good will and the support of those 
causes which make for genuine community 
betterment will at last give their own se- 
cure reward. The paper comes to have a 
position of its own. It even comes to have 
a sort of personality. Because it is known 
to speak carefully and out of ample knowl- 
edge and with genuine character at last 
every one of its pronouncements comes to 
be read with care, to be considered with 
earnestness, and often to be accepted as 
the very voice of the best thought and feel- 

87 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

ing of the community. The editorial page 
will become a power if through a long period 
of years it shows itself worthy of power. And 
there is no more masterful and potent lead- 
ership than that of a great newspaper in 
which the people have confidence. 

In this field special series of articles written 
by experts and men of large experience and 
effective powers of expression have obtained 
a wide recognition. Large sums of money 
have been spent in securing such articles. 
Great pains have been taken to secure de- 
pendable accounts of matters of public in- 
terest. Much of the finest work in contem- 
porary journalism has been in this field. 

The maintaining of a staff of experts 
who know the whole field of international 
relationships and who have technical 
knowledge in relation to the various mat- 
ters of public interest is of the greatest 
importance in this matter of securing a 
position of community leadership. And 
along this line much notable work has been 
done by great American dailies. 

VI. The newspaper which misleads the 
community. 

All the power of leadership which comes 

88 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

to a commanding newspaper can be dis- 
torted in such a fashion that the organ of 
public opinion becomes a misleading in- 
fluence in the public life. There is never 
ceasing pressure from sinister sources and 
from sources which represent movements 
which though not themselves questionable 
are ready to use methods which are very 
questionable indeed. And under this cease- 
less demand it is not surprising that the 
power of the press is sometimes prostituted. 
This matter is of so much importance that 
it is not fair to ask the newspaper men to 
do all the fighting and all the resisting of 
pressure. The readers must keep awake 
and observant. They must let the man- 
agement of the papers know how they ap- 
preciate their loyalty and how watchfully 
they are following the influences which 
prey upon the press. In this way they will 
give new courage and strength to a group 
of men who are often struggling against 
heavy odds. The newspaper which delib- 
erately and skillfully and of set purpose 
misleads the public is a menace to the life 
of the community and that paper should 
be relentlessly and ceaselessly opposed. 

89 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

The matter of race prejudice is more and 
more a thing of great practical importance. 
The questions of race are becoming the 
outstanding body of questions before the 
mind of the world. And that type of 
journalistic misleading of the public which 
consists in creating and developing race 
hatred is one of the most dangerous forms 
of this particular brand of prostituted 
leadership. 

VII. The newspaper which inspires a 
community. 

The man who goes in and out of a news- 
paper office is in no danger of becoming a 
dreamy and sentimental idealist. He is a 
very shrewd and hard-headed and knowing 
person. But for all this it is possible for 
him to be in a very brave and productive 
sense a man of vision and of moral enthu- 
siasm. And it is possible for a newspaper 
to exercise a far-reaching influence as an 
inspiring force in the life of the community. 
It is not too much to ask that the best 
things men think and the finest things 
which they do shall be given due recogni- 
tion in the pages of the papers which come 
to our homes and to our offices every day. 

90 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

And it is not too much to expect that a 
certain atmosphere of belief in the com- 
munity spirit of good shall permeate the 
papers which are given such constant en- 
trance to our minds. To a notable extent 
just this sort of thing has been accom- 
plished in many newspapers in America. 
Sometimes it is a very specific matter of 
connection with the work of such an insti- 
tution as the Christian Church, as in the 
case of that powerful daily which gives two 
full pages every Monday evening to ser- 
mons preached the day before. Sometimes 
it is in series of articles about great themes 
of human welfare or movements against 
entrenched evils and such articles are read 
in many of our cities on the pages of out- 
standing papers. Sometimes it is a spirit 
which in subtle fashion is distilled from the 
whole paper. You put it down feeling that 
it is the product of clean minds applied to 
great and constructive tasks. 

VIII. The newspaper which debauches a 
community. 

We must frankly admit that there have 
been and are newspapers which leave a 
trail of slime wherever they go. They de- 

91 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

velop a remorseless expertness in the pur- 
suit of the loathsome details of every crime 
and in respect of the practice of vice. 
They fill their pages with the hot brutali- 
ties of uncontrolled men and women. They 
find deadly secrets of making vice fasinat- 
ing and of sneering at virtue. They culti- 
vate the mood of disbelief in goodness and 
unabashed loyalty to the selfish and the 
sordid. They minister to every fierce and 
uncontrolled passion and they create an 
appetite for the hectic and the fevered in- 
dulgence which every age must fight as a 
bitter foe. They become the mouthpiece 
of the underworld and the citadels of law- 
lessness. And they scatter seeds of evil as 
far as their pages go. The newspaper 
which debauches a community is one of 
the most brilliant examples of efficient and 
highly articulated evil. 

It is not hard to see the duty of the 
Christian man and of the Christian Church 
in respect of this whole situation. It is not 
too much to expect that the Christian 
forces shall be an articulate and well or- 
ganized group always ready to support the 
press of honesty and good will. The news- 

92 



PRESS AND COMMUNITY 

• 

paper which gives an accurate reflection of 
the common life, which interprets it faith- 
fully and nobly, which guides the com- 
munity with intelligence and sagacity and 
right purpose, and which inspires in men 
devotion to those good principles and good 
causes which shine like pure gold in the 
midst of the disillusionments of life, the 
newspaper which commits itself to these 
things has a right to expect the support of 
Christian men and of the Christian Church. 
The newspapers of falseness and bad will 
are the most powerful foes of the advance- 
ment of the kingdom of God and against 
them the church must inevitably make it- 
self felt. 

Like the wise man of whom the book of 
Ecclesiastes tells, the Christian man of 
to-day would walk in the light of knowl- 
edge and not in the darkness of ignorance. 
The newspaper of honesty and good will 
is his ally. And he must help to produce it 
and he must maintain it. So will another 
great institution find its relation to those 
matters which are the concern of the 
human community as well as the deepest 
responsibility of the Christian Church. 

93 



VII 

THE LAND WITH A FRIENDLY 
FACE 

If I forget thee, Jerusalem. — Psalm 137. 5. 

Robert Louis Stevenson in his South 
Sea Island home dreamed of the mother- 
land with such longing as a man of Scot- 
tish birth ever feels for the land of the 
heather. The streets of Edinburgh, that 
Athens of the North, lived in his mind 
until he saw their very buildings. The 
land and the city which he could reach 
only in thought were enshrined in his 
heart. So centuries before an exile in the 
low-lying lands of Babylonia dreamed of 
the noble hill country of his fathers and of 
the city which was its capital. So the 
poignant cry was torn from his heart: "If 
I forget thee, O Jerusalem!" 

One does not have to be an exile far from 
home in order to feel the thrill of the mean- 
ing of the life of one's native land. There 
are moments when the splendor of the best 
hours of its history gleam before our eyes 

94 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

in sudden brightness. There are moments 
when the far-flung potency of its present 
life stands startlingly revealed. And there 
are moments when the promise of its fu- 
ture is like the dawn which Kipling saw 
come up like thunder in its impact of 
light. 

The fifteenth century was the century of 
America's discovery. The spirit of impetuous 
and dauntless adventure carried men upon 
quests never attempted before. And there 
are no more surprises left for the dwellers 
in this earth like that bright astonishment 
with which men learned of the New World 
on the other side of the sea. The sixteenth 
century was the century of exploration. 
Everywhere peering eyes moved tracing 
out the lines of hill and valley and river in 
the new continent. On mountain tops 
they stood gazing upon broad valleys never 
before seen by men from Europe. They 
floated upon broad and expansive rivers. 
They looked upon the blue waters of new 
seas. The seventeenth century was the 
century of settlement. Now men came 
not to explore but to build homes. Up 
and down the Atlantic seaboard their 

95 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

towns arose. Sometimes they were Puri- 
tans desiring to make a new land free 
from Anglican mastery, as in New Eng- 
land. Sometimes they were cavaliers flee- 
ing from an England held in Puritan hands, 
as in Virginia. Sometimes they were 
Catholics come away from a Protestant 
land, as in Maryland. Sometimes they 
were Protestants like the Huguenots flee- 
ing from a land where Catholic leadership 
was dominant. But they were all seeking 
homes and an opportunity to express the 
convictions which mastered them in their 
own way. They were all brave men, and 
they were ready to pay a price of bitter 
privation for the building up of a new life 
in the New World. The eighteenth cen- 
tury was the century of growth and inde- 
pendence. The colonies enlarged in num- 
bers and in power. Their mutual interests 
drew them together. At last together they 
achieved their freedom and united in a 
common life. So the republic was born, 
and in 1789, the very year of the fall of the 
Bastile, George Washington became the 
first President of the United States. The 
nineteenth century was a time of expan- 

96 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

sion and political integration. The per- 
manent unity of the nation was achieved 
on the field of battle, and strangely enough 
all this was wrought out in the very period 
when Italy was accomplishing its unifica- 
tion under Cavour and Germany was being 
unified by Bismarck. What had been a 
group of States along the Atlantic sea- 
board became a nation reaching from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, a nation of such 
natural resources as fairly staggered the 
imagination. 

So much for history. Is it possible to 
look into the future? Is it possible to de- 
tect the distinguishing notes of the life of 
our nation in the twentieth century? Can 
we trace the trails along which the thought 
and the activity of Americans will move in 
the days which lie ahead? Already some 
things have become clear. And it is at 
least within the reach of careful and sober 
judgment to declare that our task is the 
task of synthesis, the task of coordinating 
the life within and of becoming a part of 
the coordinated life of the world without. 
To put it in a more concrete fashion, the 
task of the twentieth century is to make 

97 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

friends with ourselves and to make friends 
with the world. 

In a sense America has always been the 
land with the friendly face. In the seven- 
teenth century, as we have seen, men from 
nation after nation in Europe came here to 
find the freedom which they could not 
exercise in their own land. And vastly as 
they differed, by the end of the eighteenth 
century they had learned to live together 
in mutual tolerance in the new republic. 
As the century wore on, exiles from many 
a land found America the haven of their 
hopes. Did the liberal movement fail in 
Germany in 1848? America held out wel- 
coming hands to the democrats whose land 
had failed to become a democracy. Did 
the bureaucracy in Russia persecute the 
Jews? America was the land of oppor- 
tunity to men and women and little chil- 
dren who had suffered intolerable and 
torturing experiences. Did men of south- 
ern Italy dimly dream of a larger life? 
America was the haven of their desire and 
the land where they sought and found a 
foothold. 

It cannot be denied, however, that the 

98 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

process of amalgamation has gotten woe- 
fully behind. And it cannot be denied 
that a good many men and women and 
little children have seen on the face of 
America an expression cold and indifferent 
with no warming quality of sympathy. 
That there are real and definite problems 
connected with the vast masses of unas- 
similated folk in America cannot be de- 
nied. But we must never forget that this 
defines the very terms of the problem. 
The twentieth century must achieve as- 
similation. It must achieve coordination. 
It must be the century when we make 
friends with ourselves. 

We must constantly realize that there 
are men of the noblest good will and of the 
eagerest desire for sound and brotherly 
character in every race and in every na- 
tional group to be found in our land. They 
come with sore hearts, many of the new 
arrivals. But masses of them come with 
souls all ready to kindle and to flame with 
every noble impulse and every high con- 
ception of responsible and effective and 
gracious living. And the older groups with 
their incomplete synthesis have multitudes 

99 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

of the same sort of forward-looking men. 
The real America is this brotherhood of 
good will integrated from all the races and 
nations which go to make up American life. 
Many of them come trailing clouds of 
glory, the glory of a great racial and 
national achievement. And they come 
bringing richness of appreciation and sen- 
sitiveness of spirit and sturdy strength as a 
gift to our common life. Some of them 
come trailing clouds of shame. And even 
among these the wistful desire for a good 
and stable and strong life is to be found 
again and again. Taken altogether, Amer- 
ica represents at its best the funded ideal- 
ism of the nations of the world. The 
memory of the most heroic action and the 
most understanding thought and the rich- 
est aesthetic life of the race is a part of the 
heritage of the men and women who make 
up America. And we are to learn to think 
of the great group of hearty good will, not 
in the terms of their past national or racial 
relationships but in the terms of their 
American spirit and their dependable char- 
acter. The man who meets one of them 

with averted eyes sins against the very 

100 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

deepest sanction of our national life. To- 
gether we are to face the future. Together 
we are to build the structure of our nation 
in the coming days. 

It must be admitted that there are men of 
bad will and groups of bad will in America. 
The ancestors of some of them came over 
in the Mayflower. The ancestors of some of 
them came from northern Europe. Some 
of them have memories of eastern Europe 
and some of them represent the tradition 
of southern Europe. They belong to every 
class. They are to be found in every social 
and intellectual type. Sometimes they are 
rich. Sometimes they are poor. Some- 
times they are men of learning. Some- 
times they are ignorant. There are men of 
every color and every race represented in 
America in this class of bad will. They 
must be dealt with in such a way as to 
conserve the best interests of the republic. 
And here some important principles must 
be observed. A man is to be opposed al- 
ways because he is a man of bad will and 
never because he is a member of any par- 
ticular racial and national group. There is 

no place in America for race hatred. There 

101 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

is no place in America for religious hatred. 
There must be no refusal of justice to any 
class because of its religious or racial affilia- 
tions. The propaganda of hatred against 
classes and races is un-American and crim- 
inally evil. In respect of the men of bad 
will there must be a scientific study of the 
environment out of which they have come 
and of the economic and social forces which 
have played upon them. Sometimes an 
understanding of their history is an under- 
standing of the method by which a remedy 
may be applied. Thus it comes to pass 
that out of the group of bad will, men and 
women are won to a new purpose and 
brought within the influence of the friendly 
face. To be sure, there are those who can- 
not be so reached. And it is necessary to 
deal with them in steady and strong fash- 
ion. But there must never be an outcry 
against any racial or religious group as if 
that group were the great producer of men 
of bad will. And each case must be treated 
with the most careful justice. 

With this spirit America can meet its 
first requirement of making friends with 
itself. The great faiths of the nation have 

102 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

a common foundation in the belief in a 
personal God, a belief in the moral law, a 
belief in brotherhood, and a belief in im- 
mortality. These form a notable basis of 
religious inspiration which they can share. 
So the men of good will of all the groups 
can stand together against the sordid and 
sinister forces which are a menace to us all. 
The second task which the century 
brings is that we shall make friends with 
the world. Modern science has made the 
world one. There is oneness of knowledge. 
You do not have an English kind of knowl- 
edge and a French kind of knowledge and 
an American kind of knowledge. There is 
unity in the whole vast realm of science. 
Commerce has given unity to the world of 
exchange. Every market in the world is 
affected by every other market. And the 
only safe world for commerce is a world 
with a common and dependable law. 
Transportation has been so speeded up and 
the transmission of knowledge has become 
so nearly instantaneous that with a sort 
of pardonable exaggeration one may say 
that space and time have been struck a 
body blow. The period of an isolated pros- 

103 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

perity has passed. The period of an iso- 
lated suffering of economic reverse has 
passed. Influences from the uttermost 
part of the world quickly reach every 
other part. In such a world we must 
learn to live together in friendly coopera- 
tion if any of us are to have permanent 
prosperity and happiness. Prince Kropot- 
kin's "Mutual Aid" expresses more than a 
biological principle. It expresses a prin- 
ciple of international relationships. The 
nation which would exploit the whole 
world simply ends by endangering the 
whole fabric of civilization. The land with 
a friendly face is promoting international 
efficiency when it promotes international 
good will. All the races must have a real 
place and a real opportunity in the life of 
the world. Red men, yellow men, brown 
men, black men, and white men must each 
come to a genuine opportunity for a full 
expression of the racial genius without 
crushing each other and without exploit- 
ing each other. The peril is not in any 
race. The peril is in the men of bad will 
in that race. The military party in Japan 
must be watched with close scrutiny as we 

104 



LAND WITH A FRIENDLY FACE 

watch the military party in any land. The 
democratic party in Japan must be en- 
couraged and developed as we encourage and 
develop that party in every nation. There 
is no place in the world for racial hostility. 
There is a place for hostility to the pur- 
poses of bad will in every race, even the 
white race. The nation with the friendly 
face realizes that the men of good will in 
all the world must face the task of securing 
such a method of life as shall give new 
and larger opportunity to the weak and 
the poor and those circumscribed in eco- 
nomic relationships in all the world. We 
are all capitalists in the sense that we have 
the securities of personality. And we must 
all be laborers in the sense that these 
securities must be invested if they are, to 
bring in returns. The world as a whole 
must face the economic and social problem 
and decide it in the light of a world-wide 
application of principles of social and eco- 
nomic justice. And here is the greatest 
task of the twentieth century. It will 
need all the patience and sober good will 
of many a nation with a friendly face to 
accomplish all that is imperative here. 

105 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

On this Thanksgiving Day we come to 
the hour of worship with gracious mem- 
ories and extraordinary opportunities and 
high hopes. We will not forget our Jeru- 
salem. We will remember our land with 
the deepest affection and the most conse- 
crated action. And wisely and patiently 
and with the help of God we will make 
friends with ourselves and with the world. 



106 



VIII 
THE TREASURE 

Where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be 
also.— Matthew 6. 21. 

Writing in the seventeenth century, the 
philosopher Spinoza said: "The things that 
commonly happen in life and are esteemed 
among men as the highest good (as is wit- 
nessed by their works) can be reduced to 
these three: Riches, Fame, and Lust; and 
by these the mind is so distracted that it 
can scarcely think of any other good." 
Any list of those things which men have 
considered treasures must surely include 
these three. The desire for possessions/ 
drives men through mad years of intense 
endeavor. The desire to be recognized 
and honored by other men beats like a 
fever in many a young man's blood. And 
the young person who once expressed the 
desire while moving through the world to 
taste every kind of sensation life has to 
offer only put into curiously honest speech 
that eagerness for all the swift-moving 

107 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

/ pleasures of sense which is the power in 
so many lives. There are surely more 
treasures than those which can be reduced 
to these three types, however. Dr. Henry 
van Dyke once wrote a volume of fascinat- 
ing stories called The Ruling Passion. Each 
was the tale of a life and its relation to the 
thing which that life treasured most of all. 
I remember that the ruling passion of one 

I of the characters was the love of music, i 
and that can surely exist apart from com- 
pulsion of riches and fame and lust. In- 

fdeed, the love of knowledge is one of the 
fundamental treasures. The Grammarian, 
in Browning's powerful poem, working 
"dead from the waist down," had a love of 
knowledge quite for its own sake. And 

i there is a love of power quite apart from 
the occupying of high position. "The 
Mayor of the Palace" may be quite con- 
tent to have another man possess the title 
of king as long as he holds the real au- 
thority. Then there is a love of action 
which causes a man to be happy if all his 
energies are vigorously engaged upon some 
engrossing enterprise. Action itself is his 

• passion. Action itself is his treasure. 

108 



THE TREASURE 

The thoughtful man at the threshold of 
his years of mature life and experience may 
well feel a certain wistfulness as he tries to 
find his way among the possible treasures. 
And here it needs to be remarked that a 
man's treasure is not necessarily the thing 
which he possesses. It is often the thing he < 
would like to possess. A man of abject 
poverty may be a man of the utmost avar- 
ice. The thing upon which a man fastens 
his mightiest desire is his treasure, and 
even men not addicted to constant moods 
of seriousness may well recognize that one 
of the moments of supreme meaning is the 
moment when a man selects his treasure. 
As Jesus notably phrased it: "The man's 
heart will be found with his treasure." 
And so in this sense the treasure deter- ' 
mines the character of the man. 

If we have any apprehension at all of the 
amazing penetration of the mind of Jesus, 
if we have felt his gift of cutting aside the 
unessential and coming to the really de- 
fining and significant matter, we will turn 
eagerly to hear his advice about this mat- 
ter of choosing a treasure. At first we 
may feel a trifle disappointed. Very earn- 

109 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

estly he tells his little group of friends that 
if they are wise they will not lay up treas- 
1 ures on earth. In fact, they will make it 
their supreme endeavor to lay up treasures 
in heaven. For the moment these words 
seem other-worldly, and the product of a 
mind not in genuine and hearty contact 
with the realities of the life we are living. 
The more we think of the teaching of 
Jesus, however, the more we will suspect 
that this is not true. As a matter of fact, 
with all his radiant and high climbing 
idealism, Jesus possessed a wonderfully 
practical mind. Our attention has been 
called to the frequency with which he 
spoke of money. The parable of the tal- 
ents is only an instance of the way in which 
his mind turned to those values represented 
by the currency. We must approach his 
teaching about a man's treasures with a 
constant sense of the shrewd insight as well 
as the high idealism of his teaching. 

What, then, is Jesus attempting to say 
to his disciples in this memorable word? 
Perhaps we may phrase it in this way. He 
begins with one tremendous assumption — 

' man's life is to go on beyond the reaches of 

no 



THE TREASURE 

the experience of this present world. Man 
is immortal; and if man is immortal, the 
one fundamental thing of importance in 
his choice of a treasure is that the treasure 
shall last as long as the life of the man. * 
He must not give his supreme devotion to 
anything which will wear out and leave 
him living on and on with his supreme in- 
terest dead at his feet. "You must choose 
as your treasure," says Jesus in effect, 
"something which will continue as long as 
your own life continues." An immortal 
man must have an immortal treasure. 

At this point we may be halted by an 
earnest voice which makes the observation 
that no doubt all of this is true and emi- 
nently practical providing you can be sure 
that man is immortal. But is that not 
just a point where assurance is impossible? 
And does not that vitiate the whole argu- 
ment? Here we must frankly admit that 
Jesus does not argue about immortality. 
As we said before, he assumes it. And we 
must frankly say, further, that each man 
must decide for himself whether he will 
take the risk of acting as if he is the pos- 
sessor of an immortal destiny or will build 
111 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

all his activities about some lower view. A 
very able American used to say in the days 
when the brilliant rhetoric of Colonel In- 
gersoll was attracting much attention that 
he had a great advantage over the eloquent 
skeptic. He believed in immortality. If 
he was right, he would know it and Colonel 
Ingersoll would know it. On the other 
hand, the popular foe of religion did not 
believe in immortality. If he was right, he 
would never know it, and those who dis- 
agreed with him would never know it. The 
man who took the risks of the great belief 
had from this standpoint everything to 
hope and nothing to fear. The truth is, of 
course, much deeper than this. At the 
point where a man decides what sort of a 
life he will live there is always enough un- 
certainty to make the decision a real ad- 
venture of faith. It must be so, if life is to 
keep its moral quality. But the men who 
make the great adventure enter upon a 
type of experience where immortality be- 
comes the most assured conviction. "Oth- 
ers may reason and question," says 
Browning. "We musicians know." Others 
may reason and question, we may para- 

112 



THE TREASURE 

phrase; we Christians know. The question 
at the time of decision reduces itself to 
this: Shall a man meet the fundamental 
issues in the light of the very highest pos- 
sible thought about life, or will he be con- 
tent to make his decisions on some basis 
where this high demand is not felt. And 
the spirits with moral and spiritual cour- 
age will always make the great adventure. 
"I paint for eternity," declared a great 
artist. The men who listen to the pro- 
foundest voices in their lives will always * 
live for eternity. 

From the point of view occupied by 
Jesus then the question becomes: "What 
are those treasures which are permanent?" 
"What are those treasures which will not 
wear out, but will last as long as man him- 
self continues?" And the answer which 
immediately arises when once the question 
is put in this form is this : A man finds him- 
self in the midst of other people. They' 
too have an immortal destiny. If he 
makes human devotion a treasure, he has 
chosen that which has the same secret of 
continuance which belongs to his own life. 
There is a story of a wealthy magnate who 

113 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

lived near a great city. He was going 
home one night from the town weary and 
preoccupied. He left the train to find a 
luxurious limousine waiting for him. He 
sank back into its cushions heavy and list- 
less. Soon he was driving through land 
every bit of which he owned almost as far 
as eye could see. But to-night he was not 
interested in land. He was driven to a pa- 
latial house where he was master. But he 
was not interested in great houses. Just 
as he emerged from the car a door opened 
and out came a tiny mass of eager eyes 
and yellow hair, and a small voice cried, 
"Oh, father, I'm so glad you are here." 
In a moment all his listlessness was gone. 
He held the tiny child in his arms in an 
eager, happy embrace. Here was some- 

\one who could give back love for his own 
love. Here was his own child. And had 
he thought of it, here was a personality 
with all the secret of undying personality 
which belonged to his own life. Not 
, things, but people, constitute an eternal 
treasure. The man who gives his life to 

I the loving and serving of other men and 
women and little children has found a 

114 



THE TREASURE 

touch of the infinite in the finite. He is 
touching eternity whenever he touches a 
human spirit. 

All this does not mean that there is not 
a right and wholesome enjoyment and use* 
of those things which have no secret of 
eternal existence. It does mean that they 
must always be a means to an end. When- 
ever a man cares more for things than for 
people he is choosing as his treasure that 
which must fail him and prove a disap- 
pointment at last. There is a tale of an 
eminent man, full of love of letters and of 
art, who came near to the end of his life. 
One day an old family servant found him 
moving slowly and with tottering steps 
through his splendid library. He was 
touching many a treasured volume with 
sensitive, loving fingers. He was laying 
gentle hands upon one after another of 
the exquisite bits of statuary with which 
the room was adorned. He was gazing at 
the pictures all full of glory of many col- 
ored beauty. And as he moved slowly 
about he said over and over to himself, "I 
must leave you, I must leave you." All 
the things of this amazing and fascinating 

115 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

world have their glad, good place. But 
they must be the symbols and the instru- 
ments of something eternal if they are not 
to leave dust and ashes upon our lips at 
last. A man has a right to have just as 
large a fortune as he can secure honestly 
and use wisely, and especially just as large 
a fortune as he can perpetually master. If 
he becomes the slave of his fortune, as far 
as he is concerned a bitter word once 
spoken by a great optimist becomes true, 
* 'Things are in the saddle and ride man- 
kind." And the disillusionment will come 
at last when he realizes, in the shrewd, 
quaint words of David Harum, that 
"shrouds have no pockets." 

When a man has begun to give great and 
noble devotion to other people he has at 
least made a beginning in the direction of 
laying up treasures in heaven. He has 
begun to love that which will last as long 
as his own life continues. But there is a 
passionate capacity for devotion in man 
which not even the richest and noblest 
human devotion can satisfy. You are at 
least moving in its direction though you 
have not yet sighted it as you follow the 

116 



THE TREASURE 

meaning of the words of Guinevere: "Wet 
needs must love the highest when we see 
it, not Lancelot nor another." And the > 
highest is not human personality. It is 
the personality of God. There is a hun- 
ger for perfection at the heart of the con- 
fused and broken life of man which can 
be satisfied only as he gives his deepest 
devotion to the high and stainless God. 
The man of letters who lay terribly ill in a 
great city and muttered into the ears of 
the bending nurse the words, "I want — I 
want — my heavenly Father," expressed 
this unquenchable desire. "Thou hast 
made us for thyself," cried Augustine, "and 
our souls are restless until they find rest in 
thee." The ample, opulent, and exhaust- 
less resources of God are to satisfy the 
outreach of that undying spirit which in 
the midst of wayward and failing ways 
finds the passion for perfection burning at 
his heart. 

The man who has made God his supreme i 
treasure can love and serve men as he has 
never loved and served them before. He 
can use all the passing elements of this 
potential and glittering world with a mas- 

117 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

tery which appreciates, but never sur- 
f renders to the slavery of things. And as 
he gazes through the dim distances of the 
future he finds it as varied and perpetually 
satisfying as the fullness of the divine life. 
He has indeed laid up his treasures in 
heaven. He has put himself on the side 
of eternity. And his citizenship in the 
busy world where he dwells is all the more 
sure and steady because his heart is cap- 
tured by the eternal mysteries. "To un- 
derstand earth," says an old French 
proverb, "you must have known heaven." 
The real amazement which comes to a 
* thoughtful man arises when he perceives 
that he is so made that only God himself 
can be his treasure, that all other treasures 
assume their proper place when they are a 
part of this supreme and unending devo- 
tion. And because we worship a Christ- 
like God all of this is made hearty and 
human and infinitely gripping in every 
relation of life. It is this treasure which 
Jesus came to offer. It is this treasure 
which is our eternal wealth. 



118 



IX 

INCREASING THE VALUES OF THE 
WORLD 

Be fruitful.— Genesis 1. 28. 

The first chapter of the book of Genesis 
is full of the sense of God's joy in his work 
of creation. Once and again we are told 
that God saw that it was good. And his 
will that the world should be a world of 
rich productiveness is vividly declared. 
"Be fruitful" is the word which expresses 
God's purpose for the world. We seem 
far enough from the idyllic picture sug- 
gested by these ancient words. But it is 
still true that the fundamental matter in 
our existence is the matter of productive- 
ness. To advance in every way the fruit- 
fulness of the world is a high and most 
worthy calling. The producer is the fun- 
damental benefactor of the world. 

There is always the matter of produc- 
tion in the material world. The man who 
cooperates with nature and as a tiller of 
the soil or a herdsman is a worker for the 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

fruitfulness of the world is still our funda- 
mental man. He provides us with food 
to eat and with clothes to wear. All civili- 
zation rests at last on agriculture. The 
man who brings forth the treasures of the 
mines and bends the forces of nature to 
his purpose is a producer to whose work 
we all pay toll. When he supplies us with 
coal he is making it possible for us to 
manufacture a little bit of summer in the 
midst of winter; he is making it possible 
for us to prepare our food for the eating, 
he is bringing to us stored up energy which 
will set all sorts of machinery going and 
will make us master of forces more power- 
ful than we. Every time a new and effec- 
tive machine is invented the world is a 
more potential place in which to live. The 
brilliant intellectual achievements of Greece 
depended at last upon the institution of 
slavery. The machine is to be the slave 
on whose broad shoulders the brilliant eras 
of the future are to rest. And the machine 
is to make possible a republic where every 
man can be a ruler. The world of material 
things has come to be a bewildering world. 
And in the midst of it all man moves the 

X20 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

master of the forces which he has released. 
The worker who understands the signifi- 
cance of it all has a great pride in this 
amazing fruitfulness of the human mind. 
He has his great dream of a world where 
in the noblest way every man is a pro- 
ducer and where the values of the world 
are increased by the labor of every human 
being. 

The fundamental duty of being a pro- 
ducer, of having a share in the fruitfulness 
of the world, cannot be stated with too 
much emphasis. John Ruskin put it 
powerfully once when he said, "No man 
has a right to eat a meal which he has not 
earned." The problem of a true man is 
not to escape the task of being a producer. 
It is the question of finding the fashion in 
which he can be the most effective pro- 
ducer of the most important values. 

The material world does not exhaust the 
values of life. Food and clothing answer 
to deep and structural necessities. But 
they are not an end in themselves and the 
body which they feed is not an end in it- 
self. They exist and it exists for the sake 
of making possible a more lofty life. 

121 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

Mankind is responsible for material pro- 
duction. Mankind is also responsible for 
mental production. And the normal world 
is not a world where the vast multitudes 
are productive in the material realm, and 
only a few are productive in the world of 
the mind. Mental fruitfulness is to be the 
portion of every man and every woman 
and every child. And where it is not one 
can only say that society has failed to 
function in complete and adequate fashion. 

For a good many centuries a good many 
men have been busy adding to the mental 
fruitfulness of the world. Some centuries 
have constellations of intellectual leaders 
who are a perpetual glory to the land and 
the age which produced them. The char- 
acteristic aspect of our own age is the 
increase of the number of men and women 
who may be said to be fruitful in the 
realm of the mind. The whole work of 
some men is done in this realm. And their 
mental fruitfulness makes itself felt to the 
ends of the earth. But increasingly we are 
realizing that the tasks and the pleasures 
of the mind are universal in their oppor- 
tunity and their obligation. To every ra- 
122 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

tional being comes the command, "Be 
fruitful and fill the world with wise and 
true and wholesome ideas." 

The responsibility of every human being 
is very heavy at this point. It is possible 
to let the mind perish of a sort of dry rot. 
It is possible to make action the substitute 
for thought. It is possible to avoid the 
gymnasium where the muscles of the mind 
are made strong and ready for any de- 
mand. And we must realize that the rare 
and wonderful instrument of a mind is a 
treasure of unspeakable value. It is like 
the rarest and most wonderful sort of vio- 
lin. And we must learn to play this instru- 
ment so that we will bring out all the 
music. So many people keep minds in 
their houses which they have never learned 
to play. So many people bury this talent 
in the ground instead of investing it and 
securing a noble return. 

There is one mind which every man can 

bring to fuller power and larger value all 

the time. And that mind is his own. It 

is also true that while he is doing this he 

will be affecting other minds and making 

it easier for them to reach their full ea- 
rn 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

pacity. There is always danger that a 
bright young man may suppose that adroit- 
ness is real mental power. It is the mind 
which is a sure and dependable instrument 
for the finding of the truth, for coming into 
understanding contact with reality, which 
is the mind actually attaining the highest 
value to its possesser and to the world. 

Here it is important to realize the dif- 
ference between manipulation and produc- 
tion. When a man invents an instrument 
which humanity needs, and as a result 
secures large returns, he is receiving the 
reward of actual productiveness. When a 
man applies his mind to making the largest 
use of existing instruments of value he is 
in effect adding to their number. But 
when a man by deft manipulation secures 
such control of the market or such a rela- 
tion to certain stocks that he secures a 
return without rendering a corresponding 
service, he is not a producer. In a very 
ignoble sense he is a manipulator. He is 
a parasite. The world really has a harder 
lot because he is living in it and all his 
gains have an odor about them which the 
real producer recognizes with distaste. The 

124 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

man who is choosing his life work must 
face the full significance of the fundamen- 
tal distinction. Does the work of which 
he is thinking involve a real and necessary 
service to the world, or is it merely a 
matter of becoming a participant in the 
battle of wits as to who shall be able to 
get control of the largest amount of the 
spoil? 

To be sure, the realm of production is a 
large one. On the mental side it includes 
the securing and the interpreting and 
executive activities of a system of wise 
laws. It includes all necessary tasks of 
organization and administration. But it 
does not include any activity which is a 
method of obtaining values without ren- 
dering a corresponding service. The man 
who is a mere manipulator is one of the 
most sinister figures and in a fashion one 
of the most pitiable figures in a world 
where God intended every man to be a 
producer. 

There is a great enterprise in relation to 
moral fruitfulness in the world. There is 
no more important product than character, 
and the production of character is the most 

125 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

important industry in the world. A wise 
man once declared that the purpose of 
humanity was to propagate life and char- 
acter. And when you come to think of it 
the first has no permanently good meaning 
without the second. The man who can 
teach morals, the man who can reinforce 
moral considerations, the man who can 
have a share in the production of character 
is engaged in a business which is funda- 
mental to the health of the world, and at 
last is fundamental to the very existence 
of a developing civilization. 

The fruitfulness of humanity finds a par- 
ticularly happy expression in the social 
spirit. And this social spirit, although it 
has to do with many men and women and 
many little children, must find lodgment in 
particular minds and hearts. There is no 
brotherly feeling which floats about in the 
world at large, sweetening life without hav- 
ing any contact with particular lives. The 
new society is produced as individual men 
are saved from the selfish mind and be- 
come possessed of the social mind. When 
a man commits the Golden Rule to his life, 
and not merely to his memory, he is pro- 

126 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

ducing, as far as his own character is con- 
cerned, the social spirit. Most people are 
very happy to apply the social spirit to 
their own circle. But there are masses of 
people all about them who simply never 
come within that circle. When Thomas 
Mott Osborne said he wanted every crim- 
inal to come to the place where he would 
think of all other men as his pals, he was 
setting forth an ideal which would have 
transforming effect outside our penal insti- 
tutions. The social mind considers all 
other minds significant. It finds all other 
lives interesting. It is ready to offer to 
each a real quality of comradeship. It is 
ready to find in each something to love. 
And it thinks of human nature as the 
most wonderful land in its perpetual pos- 
sibilities as regards the discovery of new 
and glorious and unsuspected treasures. 
There is no bloom and no fruit of the indi- 
vidual life more potent for good among 
men than the growth of the social spirit. 
Every human value in the world is multi- 
plied as the social spirit grows. 

The root of the social spirit lies in the 
ability to view all people in the light of 

127 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

their possibilities rather than of their 
achievements. A character in one of 
Archibald Marshall's stories says to the 
father of the young woman he is to marry: 
"I have not done anything to deserve her 
yet, but I will if you let me have her." 
What he said was not quite true, for he 
had already attained qualities of character 
and of robust manhood which are the final 
matters to those who really look into the 
heart of life. But he was young and his 
achievements all lay in the future. The 
father believed in his capacity. And that 
belief made all the difference in the world. 
Life becomes an infinitely interesting expe- 
rience if we once realize that all the while 
we are meeting people with unsuspected 
powers slumbering within them. All the 
people we meet are really abler of mind, 
richer of nature than they have ever dis- 
covered. To help them to make the dis- 
covery is to exercise the true social spirit. 
And it is the most effective sort of activity 
in increasing the values of the world. 

The fruitfulness of human life has a 
most important expression in the develop- 
ment of the sense of beauty and the noble 

128 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

response to its summons. There are many 
kinds of beauty in the world. There is 
beauty of line and color in respect of 
things, there is beauty of unfolding life, 
there is the beauty of thought and there is 
the beauty of character. Each form of 
beauty has its place. And each is de- 
pendent upon its relation to some higher 
variety until you come to the highest kind 
of all. The sense of beauty in things and 
beauty in people, of beauty in speech and 
beauty in character, is a growing thing, de- 
veloping as we heed it and give it place in 
our lives. The more leisure a people pos- 
sesses, the more opportunity there is to 
discipline and develop the love of beauty 
until it receives fine expression in every 
aspect of a nation's life. Sinclair Lewis' 
Main Street opens with a rather intense 
emphasis on the ugliness of the typical 
Middle Western town. There is more to 
be said about any town than you can say 
after looking down its main street. But in 
the long run the main street ought to ex- 
press the sense of harmony as well as the 
capacity for utility. Our own nation has 
passed the pioneer stage in much of its life. 

129 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

It has new responsibilities to the spirit of 
beauty which has such deep kinship with 
the spirit of holiness. In this regard we are 
to be fruitful and fill the land with material 
and intellectual and moral loveliness. 

The highest of all the values of the world 
are the spiritual values. And our fruitful- 
ness is by no means complete until it in- 
cludes the realm of the spirit. Most of us 
have known some people who somehow 
gave us a sense of spiritual altitude. It is 
not that they were posing. That would 
have made quite impossible the very im- 
pression of which I speak. It is not that 
they were conscious of spiritual height. 
The charm and the wonder was just their 
entire unconsciousness. They were all the 
while assuming that other people looked at 
the world from their own lofty position. 
And in an astonishing number of cases 
people rose to the demand. It is tremen- 
dously hard to disappoint sincere spiritual 
expectation. We all know when we stop to 
think of it that the people of spiritual 
height are the great people in any enter- 
prise. They have a place all their own. 
They do a work all their own. They are 

130 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

a part of the best capital of the world. We 
watch them with a certain wistfulness. 
Sometimes we wonder if their kind is van- 
ishing from the earth. It would be a ter- 
ribly sad and lonely place without them. 
We may not rise to their height. But we 
need them as a shelter in a time of storm. 
The command to be fruitful comes to a 
climax of meaning in this field of spiritual 
values. Jesus was the supreme example of 
spiritual worth. And he has kept impart- 
ing great secrets of spiritual productiveness 
to men these twenty centuries. The con- 
sciousness of the nearness of God and the 
consciousness of the commanding reality of 
spiritual things alive in a human being is 
really the greatest wealth to be found in all 
this world. 

In all these ways each generation is to 
increase the values to be found on this 
planet. It is to be richer in material values 
because we have lived. It is to be richer in 
character because we have walked the ways 
of the earth. It is to be richer in mental 
power and in attained knowledge because 
we have used our minds. It is to be richer 
in social interest and consecration because 

131 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

we have moved among men. It is to be 
richer in the sense of beauty, in the pos- 
session of beautiful things and in the pos- 
session of the invisible beauty which speaks 
through material things because we have 
lived to love the things which have clean 
beauty and noble grace. It is to be a world 
richer in all those attributes of the spirit 
which come from an awareness of God and 
all the realities which lift this mortal into 
the realm of immortality. In every way 
we are to be producers. And in all these 
fashions we are to add to the values of the 
world. We are to be fruitful in these ample 
ways. We are to multiply all good and 
beautiful things. We are to fill the world 
with material and moral and mental and 
social and aesthetic and spiritual values. 

The man who in this deep, true sense is 
a producer is one who fills the place in the 
world which God meant him to fill. He 
may have little recognition. But he has 
that inner and outer wholesomeness which 
comes to a man who thinks honestly and 
works faithfully and acts fearlessly, and is 
in constant contact with the actualities of 
things. He comes at last to that inner 

132 



INCREASING THE VALUES 

serenity which is the heritage of the good 
and honest worker in the midst of all the 
confusions of the world. 

It is with almost a shock of recognition 
that we realize how deeply productive was 
the life of Jesus in all these fashions. He 
released forces which increased every sort 
of real value there is in the world. In this 
deep sense his was the most productive life 
of history. The triumph of his kingdom 
means the conservation of every noble 
value in the life of this world and the at- 
tainment of every completion of value in 
the world to come. 



133 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

The things which are seen are temporal; but the 
things which are not seen are eternal. — 2 Corin- 
thians 4. 18. 

All boys admire men of action. And if 
it is true that all girls read boys' stories 
and no boys read girls' stories, then all 
girls admire men of action too. And the 
instinctive regard for men of powerful and 
achieving activity never quite dies out of 
our hearts. We may stop reading tales of 
adventure, but we do not cease to regard 
the man of the mighty deed with a quick- 
ened beat of the heart and a thrill of en- 
thusiasm. And we respond to the words 
a certain poet wrote about God: 

"Our Lord is still the God of might, 
In deeds, in deeds he takes delight." 

There may be rough and unlovely as- 
pects to Cromwell's character, but as we 
watch him lift England into a new place 
in the estimation of all Europe, and as we 

134 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

feel the march of his far-reaching and fruit- 
ful activities, we have the sense of satisfac- 
tion which comes from the contemplation 
of a life which has expended vast energies 
in notable ways. Here was a real man 
living a real man's life. You all the while 
know that at the heart of the common- 
wealth is a man of massive and potent will 
who crystallizes ideas into deeds with al- 
most bewildering force. And when over 
against the period of Cromwell you think 
of an age restless for lack of leadership, 
with no commanding figure at its center, 
you have a wistful loneliness as you look in 
vain for the masterful man. 

You may be reluctant to turn from the 
quick and decisive force of the man of ac- 
tion to the more quiet and subtle processes 
of the man of thought, but sooner or later 
you are forced to admit that the man of 
action is not the only hero. The thinker 
sits upon the throne of the world, and it is 
perfectly easy for a battle which has been 
won by the force of arms to be lost by the 
mind of man. When the philosopher Kant, 
in his town at the far border of Germany, 
quiet and untraveled, goes on with his 

135 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

great speculations, the character of multi- 
tudes of unborn children is being affected 
by his labors. He lifted the categorical 
imperative and gave it a new place in the 
thought of more than one generation. And 
after you have surveyed the epoch-making 
character of his thinking you are ready to 
agree with the poet who declared: 

"The man who idly sits and thinks 
May sow a nobler crop than corn, 
For thoughts are seeds of future deeds, 
And when God thought a world was born." 

Altogether you may be inclined to divide 
the lordships of the world between the man 
of thought and the man of action. The 
one plans, the other executes. The one 
thinks things out, the other acts things 
out. And both together make the com- 
plete contribution which is needed in the 
life of the world. If you do come to such a 
conclusion, you are quite ignoring another 
and a very significant type. You are for- 
getting the place in the world of the mys- 
tic. You are forgetting the significance of 
the man who lives by seeing the invisible. 
You are forgetting the man who discovers 

136 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

the meaning of the wonderful realm of the 
inner life and finds there a kingdom of vast 
and far-reaching significance. It is easy to 
underestimate the mystic. It is easy to 
misunderstand the mystic. But for all 
that he is one of the great figures among 
the children of men. He is worth knowing. 
He is worth understanding. And there is 
something which he has to say to every 
one of us. His very mistakes are full of 
instruction. And even when he takes the 
wrong way we have a deeper apprehension 
of the meaning of life when we come to 
know why he was so misled. 

Sometimes the mystic is a visionary con- 
spicuously lacking in all practical abilities. 
We are rather inclined to despise him then, 
though once and a while some writer, in 
sharp reaction from all the tense and over- 
wrought activity of our nervous civiliza- 
tion, writes an enthusiastic tribute to the 
man who in his own way says, "Good-by, 
proud world, I'm going home," and dreams 
his way into a realm undisturbed by mov- 
ing belts and wheels and undistracted by 
all the hot and driven efficiency of con- 
temporary life. As a matter of fact, the 

X37 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

visionary is an undisciplined mystic. He 
has flashes of wonderful insight, and if 
there is a shrewd practical man near him, 
sometimes there is discovered an amazing 
cash value to his dreams. He represents 
the raw material of mysticism rather than 
its finished product. He is a sort of fer- 
tilizer of the human spirit. His value is 
less in what he produces than in what he 
helps other people to produce. He does, 
it must be said, do his share in making the 
human soil more fertile, and there is a 
process by which much soil loses its pro- 
ductivity unless it is fertilized by a type of 
life at the farthest remove from the tense 
and strained expert who is in a measure 
disintegrating his nervous system at the 
very moment when he is using it so effec- 
tively. So the visionary is not nearly so 
useless as he might at first sight appear. 
He is a rather primitive person, and there 
is an ampler and more disciplined life be- 
fore him if he will have it so. But he is 
not quite the cumberer of the ground he is 
sometimes made out to be. Of course you 
cannot afford to have too many of him, 
and if our civilization were less over- 

138 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

wrought there would be little place for 
him at all. He would then represent the 
man of disciplined vision in the making. 
He would be the adolescence of productive 
mysticism. 

Sometimes the mystic is a poet. There 
was a time when we were inclined to think 
of all poets as mystics. But there are a 
good many poets to-day who would scorn 
the relationship. The brittle and cold in- 
tellectualism of the processes of Amy Low- 
ell, except when fired by some heat of mere 
animal warmth, has no kinship with any- 
thing any sane person would ever call 
mysticism. Perhaps it has little kinship 
with anything a person of real discrimina- 
tion would call poetry. But at any event 
there is a school of writers of what they 
are pleased to call poetry, and what often 
does show brilliant qualities of its own, 
who would cheerfully and even eagerly 
admit that they owe nothing to the insight 
of the mystic. The moment you open the 
pages of Wordsworth you are in a differ- 
ent world. Here the visible is always the 
symbol of the invisible. Here the seen is 
always the vehicle for the expression of the 

139 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

meaning of the unseen. Here the glory of 
the inner and hidden life is all the while 
cutting its way into the hard and brittle 
world of things. Here the mystic speaks 
in words all cleansed and sweetened and 
beautified by some secret experience in the 
soul of the poet. 

In a poet like Wordsworth you have a 
step beyond the untutored mysticism of 
the visionary. Here you have a keen and 
sure-footed mind. Here you have a feel- 
ing steadied and disciplined by the wise 
and steadying teaching of experience. The 
fire burns with wonderful brightness. It is, 
indeed, the fire never seen on sea or land. 
But it is no erratic and lawless thing. For 
law meets with mystical beauty in the 
poet's life, and it is the great and eternal 
law of righteousness. Wordsworth's Ode 
to Duty shows us how great an ethical 
teacher the mystical poet can be. 

In Wordsworth the mystic comes very 
near to nature and very near to the com- 
mon man. The very world in which we 
live is invested with a new beauty by his 
words. And the common lives about us 
are seen with the light of the eternal gleam- 

140 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

ing in their eyes. It is very significant 
that the artificial poetry of men of an 
earlier period who had no mystical insight 
did not bring the reader near either to 
nature or to everyday people. As we 
think of this contrast it begins to become 
evident that perhaps the wise mystic is 
nearer to actuality than some of the men 
who scorn him. 

There is a type of mystic who professes 
one of the great pantheistic religions of the 
world. He is a man whose inner life is 
enriched by long and fruitful meditation. 
He has wonderful flashes of insight into 
the heart of many a mystery. He writes 
when he uses his pen with a deep and 
brooding skill. We feel that he scorns our 
quick and hurried achievements. He seems 
to live very near to the eternal. The 
pantheistic mystic, however, is all the 
while near to some very real and some 
very grave dangers. The man who wor- 
ships nature very easily becomes a man 
who worships the whole mass of things as 
they are. Moral distinctions begin to fade. 
And it is all too possible for the end to be 
the apotheosis of vice. There are dark and 

141 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

ignoble secrets which many a pantheistic 
mystic could tell. And when he enters this 
realm he becomes an actual menace to 
every fair and fruitful and clean thing in 
the world. 

There is a mystic who is a robust evan- 
gelical Christian. His mysticism is based 
firmly upon the ethical teaching of the Old 
Testament and the New. His moral dis- 
crimination becomes clearer as his spiritual 
experience deepens. But religion means 
more to him than the belief in the facts 
and the fundamental principles of the 
Christian religion. It does mean these 
things, and it means them right nobly. 
But this does not exhaust its meaning. 
And Christianity means more than the 
zestful and loyal attempt to live according 
to the teachings of Jesus. It does mean 
that, and the glory of the insight of Jesus 
into the very heart of life is clearer all the 
while. But this does not exhaust the 
meaning of the Christian religion to the 
true Christian mystic. Christianity means 
more than faithful membership in some 
branch of the historic church and busy 
activity about the tasks which it sets be- 

142 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

fore its membership. It includes all the 
privileges of this membership. But it goes 
beyond them. Christianity means more 
than the attempt to bring in a new social 
order. It does mean that. It means the 
living and the working in the light of the 
vision of the new Jerusalem come down 
out of heaven. But it means more than 
that. What, then, is the distinctive ele- 
ment in the experience of the Christian 
mystic, enriching and reenforcing all the 
things of which we have spoken? It is 
this: He possesses an inner consciousness 
of contact between his own spirit and the 
Master of life which gives propulsion and 
potency to all his activity and assurance 
and depth to all his thought. Beneath his 
thinking and his decisions there is the mas- 
tering consciousness of the presence divine, 
and all his thinking and all of his decisions 
have a new nobility because of this expe- 
rience. It was this which the early Meth- 
odists meant by assurance; it is this which 
the captains of vital piety have described 
by various names with a common meaning 
under them in many different ages of the 
life of the church. 

143 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

The Christian life as companionship with 
the living Christ is a religion with fresh 
power for every new day. The meaning of 
worship is transformed. The hour of medi- 
tation is transfigured. The whole inner life 
comes to a new apprehension of all the 
things of God and the things of men. This 
inner relation has its own history of moral 
struggle, of repudiation of evil, of the ac- 
ceptance of good, and its own expression 
on the field of activity. What fire is to a 
furnace this the experience of contact with 
God is to the power of the Christian reli- 
gion in the world. 

The experience of the Christian mystic 
is not to be an isolated thing. It is not a 
substitute for right thinking or right liv- 
ing. All of these combine to make the full 
and rounded Christian life. The inner ex- 
perience enriches the thinking and inspires 
all noble activity. And so it goes forth to 
be a practical power in the world. 

In the midst of such a discussion as this 
one is apt to be reminded that there are 
earnest minds who find these paths ex- 
tremely difficult. They are eager to do 
the will of Christ. They are eager to 

144 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

secure the triumph of his cause in their 
own lives and in the world. But they are 
confused and perplexed when the depths of 
the inner communion of the soul with God 
are being described. They are more like 
the author of the New Testament Epistle 
of James than like that marvelous thought- 
ful mystic the apostle Paul. They wonder 
a little how they are to find themselves in 
relation to these things. The mention of 
James and Paul suggests the reply. Even 
in the apostolic circle there were different 
human types. There is a place in the king- 
dom of Christ for every man and woman 
and child who is ready to do his will, what- 
ever their aptitude or lack of aptitude for 
the experiences of the richest inner life. 
Each of us is to begin where he lives and 
to begin to walk the way of Christ. As 
the years go on many a man who thought 
that all the words of the rapturous inner 
life were foreign to his experience will find 
that maturing experience and ripened 
Christian living open these doors, and the 
glories of the inner life, full of the joy of 
the inner communion, are revealed. Others 
will always be occupied about busy, loyal 

145 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

activity, and will scarcely feel the wonder 
of invisible wings. To all such the path is 
clear, and it is a noble path of Christian 
faithfulness. But they are never to scorn 
the experiences which have not come to 
them. They are never to underestimate 
the transforming contacts which, after all, 
are the central power of the Christian reli- 
gion in the world. And they are to be 
ready to welcome the vision and the splen- 
dor should they come to their lives. 

Others will find that as birds fly and as 
fish move through the sea so normally do 
their lives develop in the midst of a great 
consciousness of the presence of the un- 
seen. The living Christ becomes the most 
masterful reality in their lives. They are 
to accept gladly this experience. They are 
to seek its deepest meanings. They are to 
remember that it is to be translated into 
noble thought and into effective Christian 
action. They possess a dynamic energy 
which is to be applied to every moral and 
social task in the world. To do less than 
this would be to prostitute the very loftiest 
experience which comes within the reach of 
man. 

146 



THE MINISTRY OF THE MYSTIC 

The greatest mystic is, of course, the 
practical mystic. He is a man of thought 
and a man of action as well as a man of 
the inner communion. He is a profound 
student of men and movements. He is a 
student of history and of the way in which 
men have interpreted the mystery of life. 
He is all the while harnessing his powers 
to great tasks. Often he is a statesman. 
He is in action for the kingdom of God. 
He is shrewd and skillful in all matters of 
practical organization. He is the sort of 
man who can be trusted with great enter- 
prises. He is in the midst of the heaving 
activities of the world. And he is all the 
while working with effective energy for his 
Master Christ. And beneath all his action 
and all his thinking there is the glowing 
warmth of that inner life which is hid with 
Christ in God. 

When Dr. Frank Gunsaulus died he was 
called the first citizen of Chicago. He was 
a great and successful educator. He was 
a student of art whose influence had been 
most widely felt. He was an orator who 
had stirred untold thousands. He was a 
preacher of imperial power. He was a 

147 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

writer of books full of the richness and 
power and sweetness of his own life. And 
beneath everything else he was a Christian 
mystic whose own heart had been fired by 
the presence of God. He had stood in the 
presence of the burning bush. And the 
fire from that bush burned year after year 
in his own spirit. The Eternal was all the 
while looking out of his eyes, and all the 
while the Eternal was vocal in his speech. 
The things which are seen have their 
noblest meaning when they are suffused by 
the quality of those eternal things invisible 
but potently real to the eye of faith. And 
the Christian mystic keeps us aware of our 
citizenship in eternity. When the fire 
blazes in our own spirits if we really under- 
stand it we will not put it out. 



148 



XI 

THE GREAT COMPANION 

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of 
the world.— Matthew 28. 20. 

An old man stood on the corner where 
two thoroughfares of a great city met. 
The traffic was congested and the traffic 
officers were busily and skillfully directing 
its conflicting currents. People were mov- 
ing along the sidewalks in such masses 
that the very sight of them had something 
bewildering about it. There were old faces 
and young faces and strong faces and weak 
faces. In the midst of it all the old man 
was completely alone. He knew no person 
in all these converging companies of peo- 
ple. And there came over him the most 
acute and poignant sense of loneliness. 
He had been in solitary places in far-away 
mountains. He had been all alone in the 
country of the great plains. But he had 
never felt so forlornly solitary as at this 
turbulent crossroads in the great metrop- 
olis. 

149 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

There are a great many ways in which 
men are lonely. Sometimes it is the phys- 
ical absence of loved ones. And the heart 
crosses the sea in swift flight to the home 
where familiar faces smile and familiar 
hands move about the tasks of every day. 
There is the loneliness of lack of sym- 
pathy. There are plenty of people about, 
but the flash of the comradely eye and the 
sense of the nearness of the comradely 
heart are absent. There is the loneliness 
of the selfish man. He has no end of inti- 
mate relationships in business and in so- 
ciety. But gradually it comes home to 
him that none of these people of whom he 
sees so much really care about him. In 
spite of the round of busy activity to- 
gether and the contact of the hours of 
recreation and pleasure he is a solitary 
man. His spirit moves alone through the 
days and the nights. Then there is the 
loneliness of hostility. A man is fighting 
for a forlorn hope, and as he stands faithful 
in the hard hour he feels the strange loneli- 
ness which comes when the eyes which 
might be bright with fellowship are, in 
fact, cold with disapproval. There was a 

150 



THE GREAT COMPANION 

day in Boston when it seemed to one of 
Boston's sons that those who might have 
been his dearest friends had been turned 
by the slavery contest into bitterest foes. 

It is in a world like this with so many 
kinds of loneliness that the Master prom- 
ised to be with his disciples. He gave 
them a great task, and as they set about 
its accomplishment they might rest with 
comfort in the knowledge that he would 
be with them always even to the end of 
the world. In truth, in an even more inti- 
mate sense than these words declare he is 
the Great Companion always near to men 
and women and little children even when 
they least realize his presence. 

He is the Companion of our thoughts. 
As a matter of fact, the little world in 
which we do our thinking is a much more 
important world than we realize. You al- 
ways say a thing in your mind before you 
say it with your lips. You always do a 
thing in your mind before you do it with 
your hand. And so the man who is lord 
of his thoughts is king of his life. An ob- 
servant American writer once put it in this 
way: 

15X 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

"I hold it true that thoughts are things 
Endowed with body, breath, and wings, 
And that we send them forth to fill 
The world with good results or ill." 

This is the little kingdom where a man 
feels safest and surest. Men may sur- 
round him with urgent influences which 
sway his life. But his thoughts he feels 
are his own. Many a man does things in 
his mind which he feels sure he would 
never do in any other way. And many a 
man thinks things he feels sure he would 
never say. But all the while there is an 
unseen Presence. He lives this life in his 
own mind with the Great Companion al- 
ways near. Mrs. Wharton says of a great 
mother, "She overheard her son's thoughts." 
Not even the greatest mother can always 
do that. But the Master himself always 
overhears the whole silent conversation of 
the mind with itself. He is the Companion 
of the lonely night hour. He is quick to 
catch that swift thought of the busy day 
hidden behind the mask of a face which 
tells no tales. And so he knows us with 
that astonishing insight from which no se- 
crets are hid. But the unseen guest may 

152 



THE GREAT COMPANION 

be made the seen and welcomed friend. 
We may rise in the morning glad of his 
nearness and with the first morning prayer 
committing our minds to his keeping. We 
may meet the problems of the day remem- 
bering his presence, and at last every thought 
may be colored and ennobled because we 
live in the daily sense that he is with us. 

The only safety in the hour of tempta- 
tion is to find something more real than 
the temptation. And the subtle appeal 
which sweeps us from our moorings can be 
mastered only in the presence of a mightier 
appeal. This is the tremendous advantage 
of those who practice daily thinking in the 
consciousness of the presence of the Great 
Companion. The growing sense of his 
presence becomes a thing of strategy when 
the serpent uncoils and the allurement of 
evil is with us. For the habit of looking 
up to that other Presence is now potent. 
We are not alone with the serpent. We 
are fighting the serpent in the presence of 
Christ. The arena of the inner life has 
many fierce conflicts. And it is when we 
lose the sense of the presence of the Mas- 
ter that we fail. 

153 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

The Master is also the companion of 
our words. He is the silent listener to 
every conversation. There are times when 
words are the thin and easy expression of 
passing moods. There are times when they 
flash with the revelation of our hidden 
purpose. There are times when they are 
the explosive expression of pent up pas- 
sion. There are times when they are the 
hard and cold vehicle of deliberate and 
cruel intention. There are times when 
they are the method of conscienceless am- 
bition. There are times when they are 
fragrant with gentle feeling and beautiful 
with tender devotion. There are times when 
they are clean as the wind on high moun- 
tains. There are times when they take 
lofty flight with the wings of the soul's 
highest desire. And all the while the Great 
Companion is present. Indeed, he is the 
giver of that vital energy which expresses 
itself in speech. And the speech which 
dishonors him is the misuse of a gift which 
comes warm and rich from his hand. 

There is such a thing as a life whose 
speech is set to the music of a constant 
consciousness of his presence. Emerson 

154 



THE GREAT COMPANION 

refers in one of his poems to "the manners 
of the sky." There is such a thing as the 
manners growing out of the consciousness 
of the august and friendly Presence. There 
is a kind of speech subtly influenced by 
the awareness of the Great Companion. A 
good deal that men say is really dictated 
by the people they meet and the expe- 
riences through which they pass. An adroit 
man does not find it hard to get a good 
many people to say just what he wants 
them to say. If a man does not watch 
closely, his speech is merely the mirror of 
his environment. The consciousness of 
the nearness of Christ gives a new back- 
ground, a new standard, a new stimulus, 
and a new inspiration. There are a great 
many things a man does not say because 
of his invisible Friend. There are a great 
many things a man does say because of 
that high prompting. The fine old phrase, 
"His conversation is in heaven," expresses 
something of the meaning of all this. 

Men go to no place where the Great 
Companion does not follow them. And 
there is no difficult or intricate or ugly 
situation which comes to the point where 

155 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

it crystallizes into speech without his un- 
derstanding apprehension. There is infinite 
sympathy as well as infinite nearness. 
There is infinite comprehension as well as 
a perpetual and insistent and noble de- 
mand. Professional life, business activi- 
ties, and all the manifold processes of 
statesmanship come to the point of speech 
under the scrutiny of this constant listener 
to the words of men. 

The Master is the companion of our 
deeds. Our thoughts deepen into feeling. 
They leap through our lips in energetic 
speech. They harden at last into the steel 
strength of deeds. And as what we are 
becomes what we do the Great Compan- 
ion stands at our side. There are deeds 
which are more the thoughtless expression 
of nervous energy than the deliberate ex- 
pression of intention. There are deeds 
which take their color from our surround- 
ing. For men, like chameleons, often wear 
the protective coloring which makes it 
hard to distinguish them from the other 
men about them. "Everybody does it" 
seems to many people the sufficient justi- 
fication for their actions. There are deeds 

156 



THE GREAT COMPANION 

in which the slowly maturing experience 
of years, the maturing processes of thought, 
the crystallizing decisions after countless 
moral struggles put their whole meaning 
into decisive action. And all the while 
the Great Companion is waiting, ready to 
save us from our own carelessness, ready 
to rescue us from our environment, and 
ready to deliver us from evil intentions 
into that goodness of purpose which is the 
safety of the soul. When we do evil things 
we are prostituting the instant gift of ca- 
pacity to act to those deeds which dis- 
honor the giver. When we do good things 
with good purposes in the doing we are 
entering into fellowship with that spirit of 
perpetual goodness which is the spirit of 
Christ. 

Blessed is the man who does his thinking 
in constant consciousness of the nearness 
of the Great Companion. Blessed is the 
man who speaks with a deep awareness of 
the presence of the invisible Listener. 
Blessed is the man whose action expresses 
a conscious companionship with the living 
Christ. 

It is in this fashion that a man is deliv- 

157 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

ered from life's most devastating loneli- 
ness. There is a wonderful room in the 
human heart which is empty until God is 
there. Just outside that room he waits 
within our lives, but not within the throne 
room until we open the doors and bid him 
welcome. Then the last solitary pang of 
the spirit's loneliness is transferred to the 
glowing gladness of the heart which wel- 
comes its King. A man can never be 
lonely in the same sense again when he 
knows that the Master is with him in the 
gladness of a fellowship freely chosen. 

And this acceptance of the nearness of 
Christ, so that it becomes a thing we choose 
and accept and love, brings us nearer to all 
other human beings. For nearness to God 
means nearness to all the other men and 
women and little children in the world. 
The heart of loneliness is alienation. And 
the man who gladly practices the presence 
of Christ has the heart of a friend as he 
moves about the turbulent town, the little 
village, and the open country. His per- 
sonal experience of fellowship with Christ 
is the beginning of a new social experience 
with men. 

158 



THE GREAT COMPANION 

Jesus departed from the eyes of men to 
live perpetually in their hearts. So he is 
to mold thoughts and words and feelings 
and civilizations and so he is perpetually 
renewing the life of the world. 



159 



XII 
THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

All thy works shall give thanks unto thee. . . . 
Thou openest thy hand and satisfieth the desire of 
every living thing. — Psalm 145. 10, 16. 

Two men well under forty were walking 
down a city street at the close of a hard 
and testing day. They were tired in body, 
tired in nerves, and their eyes were a little 
dull and heavy. They paused to greet a 
little old man they knew very well. He 
was over seventy. He was still in busi- 
ness. And the end of this particular day 
found him lively as a cricket. There was a 
bright light in his eye. And there was 
something in his voice which suggested un- 
abated vitality. "How do you do it?" one 
of the younger men asked him. "Here we 
are at half your age fed up and wondering 
if the game is worth the playing. And you 
are like a schoolboy keen to get into a 
game. Are you never tired?" The old 
man chuckled a little. But there was a 
serious light in his eye as he replied: "My 

160 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

body often gets tired. It's tired now. But 
a man's spirit never gets tired as long as 
he is heartily grateful for the privilege of 
living." 

The two men walked on in silence for a 
moment. Then one of them said: "I won- 
der if the spirit of gratitude can keep a 
man young. Something has done it for 
him." 

'T would travel a long distance to dis- 
cover his secret," said his friend. "It may 
be it comes just to this. He has kept a 
child's heart in the midst of the activities 
of a man." 

There are a good many exquisite wailing 
voices to be heard in our time. And they 
are setting a good deal of our life to a 
minor key. They have some important 
things to say to us and we can by no means 
ignore them. But we do have a right to 
ask if they have told us the whole truth. 
We do have a right to ask if they have 
said the last word. We do have a right to 
inquire whether an honest facing of all the 
tragedies of life does make it necessary to 
enter a city of the dreadful night. We 
have a right to ask if there are not great 

161 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 






and triumphant secrets of joy which will 
yet transform our lives and set our activi- 
ties to music. 

The author of the one hundred and 
forty-fifth psalm was sure that he had 
found great secrets of gladness. He felt, 
indeed, that all life was full of the will to 
sing. And he felt that every deep and 
real desire God had put into human life 
was the promise of its own satisfaction. 
So he released the music of his own glad- 
ness in a happy song. He brought new 
spirit to every task because he was filled 
with gratitude that God allowed him to be 
a part of creation in such a glorious world. 
The privilege of living was a rapture in his 
soul. 

If we stop to think of it, we will see that 
the recovery of the ancient rapture for liv- 
ing is one of the great necessities of the 
modern world. (We have already lost the 
battle if we have lost enthusiasm for the 
fight. We have already won the battle if 
our hearts have the deathless gladness of 
those who know that life is a good gift 
from the good God.) Let us analyze some 
of the aspects of this appreciation of the 

162 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

privilege of living when it has really come 
to its own in a human life. 

I. In the first place, there is the priv- 
ilege of fellowship with the natural world. 
However we appraise it, the world in 
which we live is a most astonishing place. 
Such endless energies move through it. 
Such exhaustless potentialities lie folded in 
its heart. It is a fairyland of color. It is 
a storehouse of power. It is an arsenal of 
weapons — but just there we stop. That is 
just the difficulty , we say. It is an arsenal of 
weapons. It is a fortress. But it is against 
us. It is our foe. It strikes us remorse- 
lessly. It breaks down our strength. It 
wears out our vitality. It brings us all to 
defeat at last. How can we sing in a 
world which is against us? How can we 
lift a psalm over the privilege of living in 
a world which lies in wait to strike us 
down? The world is just a great grave- 
yard. The vast majority of all who have 
lived in it are crumbling to dust some- 
where in its recesses. It is the momentary 
abode of the living. It is the home of the 
dead. 

Such considerations seem very weighty. 

163 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

They seem extremely cogent when we are 
tired. They seem most convincing when 
we are weary of responsibility and are 
seeking for some excuse which will justify 
us if we refuse to play the man. We ought 
to suspect arguments which fit into our 
lethargy, and supplement our cowardice, 
and are the supporters of our refusal to 
meet life's just demands. The truth is 
that this vast order, which seems so imper- 
sonal and so careless of our individual 
needs, is the only basis upon which a good 
life for the race could be built. Only a 
world whose order can be depended upon 
can be the secure home for stable living. 
And it is when we violate the standards of 
this great order that we must suffer. When 
we conform to its structural demands, lo! 
it becomes our servant. We move through 
the open country in our railroad trains. 
We move across the ocean in great liners 
whose speed fairly ignores wind and wave. 
We move through the air in such flight as 
birds have never been able to accomplish. 
The world is our foe only if we refuse to 
learn its secret. It is the only sort of 
world which could be the friend of all men. 

164 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

Its very uniformities make that possible. 
And the very victory it wins over the body 
at last is only the supreme opportunity for 
man's spirit to reveal its quality. It is to 
disown the very nature of this dauntless 
spirit to think of it as bent to the fate 
which meets the body. When the spirit 
has used the implements of this world it 
leaves the school whose tasks it has com- 
pleted. Death is not extinction. It is 
graduation. And the important thing about 
this view of the deathlessness of man's 
spirit is just that it is the natural, the in- 
stinctive, the childlike view. It is sophis- 
tication which teaches us to hesitate about 
the undying spirit of man. And the mo- 
ment we accept the natural view that the 
spirit has its own high destiny we have a 
new sense of the meaning of this natural 
world in which we go to school. We will 
not always be in its quaint little rooms. 
We will not always play its curious and 
pleasant games. We will not always meet 
its bruises and pains. But we will always 
remember our schooldays with delight. 
The old school will be a happy memory in 
many an hour when we have passed be- 

165 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

yond its disciplines and when its joys seem 
like those of childhood. 

It is a good school. It develops us as we 
need to be developed. It disciplines us as 
we need to be disciplined. And it offers 
us, after all, a friendly hand as we move 
on through the vast adventure of our 
deathless spirits. 

II. In the second place, there is the 
privilege of fellowship with people. There 
are about a billion seven hundred million 
people in the world to-day. We shall not 
know all of them. We shall not know very 
many of them. But in our own place in 
this mighty company we shall find oppor- 
tunity for the most fascinating and the 
most significant contact with varieties of 
mind and heart and temperament which 
will give our life much color and richness. 
Adventures among human spirits have an 
exhilaration and a delight which is all 
their own. There is the fresh responsive- 
ness of youth. There is the strong decision 
of maturity. There is the mellow richness 
of age. What quantities of kinds of people ! 
And what varied sorts of experience we 
may have among them! 

166 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

But here, again, the objector arises. He 
is not ready to sing in gladness about all 
the people there are in the world. He only 
knows a few. But he knows enough — and 
more than enough. For he has discovered 
that people do not always help. Some- 
times they hurt. And sometimes they hurt 
very badly. They get in your way. They 
get in the way of your thinking. They get 
in the way of your feeling. They get in 
the way of your activity. They break 
your heart. They crush your life. They 
are the most tragic aspect in the life of the 
world. They leave you torn and broken 
and lonely at last. 

We have no desire to ignore this voice. 
We have no desire to deny the true things 
which it utters. But here, again, we in- 
sist on having the whole truth. And the 
whole truth leaves us with all the inspira- 
tion for grateful singing still in our pos- 
session. We must remember that very 
often the dark face which looks at us is a 
reflection of our own. People are a good 
deal like mirrors. And if we give them a 
face alight with joy and good fellowship, 
it is astonishing how frequently just that 

167 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

sort of face will look back at us. Then, 
again, sooner or later all of us get more 
than we deserve at some point in life. 
Somewhere we taste that vicarious love 
which gladly lays down before us that 
which we had no right to hope to receive. 
And the very articulated evils of human 
existence give us some of the supreme 
mental and moral and social opportunities 
of our lives. How we come to our best in 
the great battles to make the world better. 
We live in a world of heroes because there 
has been a demand for heroism. All this 
is not an apology for evil. It is a very 
definite reason for saying that we can find 
reason for singing over the privilege of liv- 
ing in spite of the human evil in the world. 
At the best it offers a perfect wealth of 
human responsiveness to goodness. At its 
worst it offers an opportunity for resist- 
ance and victory. That amazing book^ If 
Winter Comes, tells of a man who seemed 
to suffer everything from perverse human 
beings which a man could suffer. At the 
darkest moment he had put within his 
reach the power to hurt terribly the man 
who was responsible for his worst calam- 

168 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

ity. There was a terrible struggle. And 
at the very crisis of the conflict Mark 
Sabre saw that he must not strike a foul 
blow no matter how many foul blows he 
had received. And in the moment of his 
victory you know what a privilege life is 
to the man who in the worst situation 
finds in his soul the power of a great for- 
giveness. 

The great and unselfish friendships of 
the world have a glorious story to tell. 
And the creative splendor of friendship 
sings through it like an anthem. Life it- 
self becomes a psalm when we have given 
the best and received the best in human 
friendship. 

III. In the third place there is the priv- 
ilege of fellowship with God. 

We human beings want a great deal. 
When we have all that our fellowmen can 
give us we want more. We may not know 
how to describe it. We may not know 
how to define it. But we want more. We 
want — startling and audacious as it may 
seem — we want God. And clear like a 
clarion from eternity comes the responsive 
cry: God wants us. That is the last satis- 

169 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

fying fact about life. That it is which 
really gives us our permanent capacity for 
song. 

But here, again, the voice of the objector 
is heard. And it takes several forms. With 
all the contradictory religions of the world 
how can we ever be sure what God is like? 
And how can we possibly be sure that he 
cares about us? Or to put another aspect 
of the objection: when we hear a summons 
which purports to come from God how 
often it seems the contradiction of our 
dearest desires, the death warrant of our 
happy hopes. How can there be satisfac- 
tion in contact with a God whose will is 
the defeat of our own personal desires? Or, 
to put still another angle of hesitation, with 
all the robust and urgent demands of the 
body, what have we to do with an ethereal 
Deity whose will seems strangely divorced 
from all the hot and eager energies of this 
busy life? And so from many an approach 
the voices of objection come. 

The reply is rather wonderfully simple. 
We meet God, if we meet him at all, at the 
summit of our nature. The deities which 
speak to us at any level lower than the 

170 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

highest at which we are able to listen are 
not true gods. The lonely, lofty voice of 
the Father God vindicates its absoluteness 
because that voice alone can call forth the 
highest and the best which is to be found 
in ourselves. So in our own natures we 
can find a test. And even as the psalmist 
says, God is the one who fulfills desire and 
not the one who quenches it; that is, pro- 
viding the desire is worthy. Indeed, we 
may say absolutely that in Christianity 
every "no" is on the way to a greater 
"yes." And the "no" is not the voice of 
an external God against our nature. It is 
the voice of the God who made us, con- 
firming and supplementing the highest de- 
mand which is already written in our own 
lives. Then this intense life of vivid phys- 
ical consciousness is itself interpreted and 
guided by the Master of life. He does not 
crush the body unless it tries to become a 
tyrant. Only when the steed tries to run 
away does the hand upon the lines become 
stern and hard. But the glow of physical 
well-being is, after all, only a landmark on 
the way to a more lofty and more satisfy- 
ing experience. And the wise God who 

171 



A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS 

loves us never allows the means to be 
accepted finally for the end. 

It is this which will keep us young. It 
is this which will keep us strong. It is this 
which will keep us glad. It is this which 
will allow us still to sing that all God's 
works praise him and that he satisfies the 
desire of every living thing. It is the com- 
panionship of God which renews and en- 
larges all the fountains of life. 

The life of Robert Louis Stevenson has a 
beautiful, poignant interest as we watch his 
battle for joy. How he fought with suffer- 
ing and pain and weakness upon the battle- 
field of his invalid's bed! And what won- 
derful victories he won! He did, indeed, 
recover much of the ancient rapture of 
living. And he did not do it without his 
own renewal of the consciousness of God. 

In spite of all the wailing voices it is a 
privilege to live. With the natural world 
and the world of human fellowship and the 
world of the divine companionship, we too 
in this late day in the life of the world have 
a right to sing. 

And all this is transfigured as we see it 
in the light of the great life and the mighty 

172 



THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING 

self-giving of the One in whose face we 
have indeed seen the face of God. If an 
old hero of the older day could sing, what 
transcendent melodies of gladness must we 
know who have seen the face of Christ! 
To live in the world where he lived and 
died and lived again is to have seen the 
very portals of the palace of reality open 
while welcoming hands summoned us to 
come within. 



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